Pop Art Design
Reflecting on the cult of celebrity, commodity fetishism and media reproduction that permeated everyday life in the postwar era, Pop Art continues to shape our society’s cultural self-understanding to this day.
Pop Art is widely regarded as the most significant artistic movement since 1945.
Fifty years after the official declaration of Pop Art in a conference at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition “Pop Art Design” paints a new picture of Pop Art – one that finally recognises the central role-played by design.
In developing the concept, the exhibition is able to draw on exhibits that have rarely been seen in this quality and density. Altogether it unites some 140 works, half of them artworks and half design objects, supplemented with numerous photographs, documents, films and texts.
The highlights of the exhibition include an early screen designed by Warhol (1958), a “Target Painting” by Jasper Johns (1957), the sofa “Leonardo” which has hardly ever been exhibited since it was first produced, Roy Lichtenstein’s large-scale “Yellow Brushstroke” (1965), James Rosenquist’s “I Love You with My Ford” (1961), the monumental floor lamp “Moloch” by Gaetano Pesce (1970-71) and Allen Jones’s “Chair” (1969).
The exhibition runs until Sunday 3 February 2012 at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, in co-operation with Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Moderna Museet Stockholm.
