Art lovers unite for Pop to Popism bus trip

16th Jan 2015 12:00 AM

Roy Lichtenstein's 1963 work In The Car is part of the of the Pop to popism exhibition, opening November 2014, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Antonia Reeve

Visit the acclaimed pop art show - Pop to Popism - currently taking Sydney by storm in the company of other art-lovers by booking a seat on a special bus trip being laid on by Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery.

'Pop to Popism' at the Art Gallery of NSW showcases more than 200 pieces including works by the major American and British artists - Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons, Haring and Hockney alongside Australia's very own pop artists Howard Arkley, Martin Sharp, Brett Whiteley and Maria Kozic.

Pop art exploded onto the cultural scene in the early 1960s as a new generation of artists rebelled against 'high art' to embrace the world of advertising, film stars, pop music and consumerism. The show includes masterpieces such as Roy Lichtenstein's first comic-style painting Look Mickey, Andy Warhol's Triple Elvis and David Hockney's Portrait of an artist.

The trip also includes a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see 'Chuck Close: prints, process and collaboration' America's highly acclaimed photo-realist painter known for his large-scale portraits of celebrities and high profile public figures. Included among his many iconic portraits are Brad Pitt, Kate Moss, Lou Reed, Roy Lichtenstein and President Obama.

The MCA event is the largest exhibition of Close's work ever presented in the southern hemisphere and is exclusive to Sydney.

The bus departs Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery on Wednesday February 25 at 6am, returning at 9.30pm on Thursday February 26. Twin share per person costs $225 or single occupancy $290. The price includes transport, entry to the exhibitions, accommodation (at the Great Southern Hotel), breakfast and morning and afternoon tea on the bus.

Bookings are essential and close on Thursday.

Bookings and payment can be made through Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery Reception, which is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-4pm, or call 6648 4863/6648 4861. 

Durham display for pop art prince Paolozzi

Sample diet plan for diabetics by nutritionist Prema Kodical

PAOLOZZI PRINT: An Empire of Silly Statistics…A Fake War for Public Relations by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi

AN EXHIBITION of work by a pop art pioneer will is to visit the region.

General Dynamic F.U.N. features 50 screenprints and photolithographs created by the late Scottish artist Sir Eduardo Paolozzi between 1965 and 1970.

Paolozzi was a compulsive collector and enjoyed turning the mundane, derelict and mass-produced into complex graphic images.

His friend JG Ballard described the series as ‘a unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds’.

General Dynamic F.U.N., a Hayward Touring exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London, will be at the DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery from Saturday, January 31, to Friday, April 10.

The Durham City venue is open 10.30am to 4pm Wednesday to Saturday during school terms and 10.30am to 4pm Tuesday to Sunday during school holidays.

Entry costs £4 for adults, £3 for concessions and £2 for children aged four to 16.

For more information, visit dlidurham.org.uk or call 03000-266-590.

Speedy Graphito: A French Street and Pop Art Legend

TUESDAY 01.13.2015 , POSTED BY SHAWN SALEME

A pioneer of the street art movement in France, Speedy Graphito brought the avant-garde to the streets and inspired a generation of future artists. Expressed in many mediums, his work is bold, vibrant and controversial – and while a good amount of his creativity is paint-based, he also works with sculpture, installations, video and photography.

Over the course of more than 30 years, Speedy has remained consistent in shaking peoples perception of societal systems. Superheroes, trademarks and other pop culture icons are found throughout his work as a way to express a bit of the collective unconscious, revealing themselves in joyful explosions of bright color.

You’ll find a selection of Speedy’s more recent work in this post. Check out his personal site or the Fabian Castinier Gallery to learn more about this well known French artist.

Written by Shawn Saleme

Shawn Saleme is a full time writer for Visual News. Having traveled to over 50 countries, his international escapades continue to influence his writing and perspective. When not in a foreign territory, he makes his home in his native San Francisco Bay Area. Become friends with him on Facebook and invite him to share drinks and stories with you.

The long march of Pop art

Scholarly account of the movement’s enduring influence
By Pac Pobric

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/The-long-march-of-Pop-art-/36622

Antônio Henrique Amaral's Homenagem ao Século 20/21 (Homage to XX/XXI Centuries), 1967. Courtesy Walker Art Center.


Since the advent of Pop art in the late 1950s, artists have been tasked with contending with its legacy and implications. Scholars and curators are now looking at the movement with a similar sense of urgency.
This month, Yale University Press is due to publish the art historian Thomas Crow’s book The Long March of Pop: Art, Music and Design 1930-95, which examines the place of artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein within the wider web of 20th-century American and international culture. The book surveys Pop art’s long history, placing it in line with American folk art traditions and linking it with later developments like the Los Angeles Punk scene of the 1980s.
The standard narrative is that Pop art faded away at the end of the 1960s, Crow says. “But I don’t think that was the case. The book offers a demonstration that the Pop impulse that came together so vividly in the 1960s was long prepared-for,” he argues. “After that, it migrated into other realms of culture.”
Crow’s book is the latest in a string of contemporary re-examinations of Pop art’s wide-ranging influence. The Seattle Art Museum is currently hosting “Pop Departures” (until 11 January), which pairs historic artists like Warhol with living ones like Josephine Meckseper. Crow’s book also comes out ahead of “International Pop” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (9 April-6 September), which casts a glance at Pop’s development beyond the Western world. But the conversation is not taking place only in the US: the Tate in London recently held retrospectives of Roy Lichtenstein (co-organised with the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013) and Richard Hamilton (in 2014).
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has been a particular hub for shows about Pop and its legacy in the past few years. In 2012, the museum hosted two shows that looked beyond Pop’s glitz and towards its darker implications: “Sinister Pop” and “Dark and Deadpan: Pop in TV and the Movies.” The following year, the Whitney held “Robert Indiana: Beyond Love”, the artist’s first US retrospective, which was followed by the museum’s grand Jeff Koons retrospective in 2014.
Donna de Salvo, the chief curator at the Whitney and co-organiser of “Sinister Pop,” says the renewed scholarly focus on Pop accompanies a reassessment of our own contemporary culture. “In many ways, the multiplicity of images we now see everywhere that are drawn from already-existing imagery was at the heart of Pop,” she says. “So Pop speaks to our current situation. History allows us a way to look at our own time and, in a funny way, Pop gives us a way to focus.”
The art historian Hal Foster, who wrote the book “The First Age of Pop” in 2011, says that in particular, Pop marks changes in the way we understand our identities. “After a certain moment in capitalist society, our status becomes that of homo imago,” he says, referring to the idea that our identity is tied to the way we are represented in images. “People are now a species of image, and this is a historical insight we can grant to Pop, and Warholian Pop in particular,” Foster says. The rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which are awash in pictures, speak to Foster’s point.
For Crow, Pop art needs to be understood in its deeper social history in order for it to make sense. “Fine art is not enhanced if you isolate it,” he says. “It becomes diminished if you aren’t looking at cross-fertilisations and feedback loops.” Pop art, perhaps more than any other art movement, invites those parallels, and illustrates their continued relevance. “It is coming to light that Pop has never gone away.”