Acquavella Galleries is pleased to announce that Painted Pop, an exhibition featuring painted works by key figures of the American Pop movement, will travel to the gallery’s location in Palm Beach. The exhibition includes important works by featured artists including Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Ed Ruscha, George Segal, Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Painted Pop is on view January 4 – February 11, 2024. The exhibition was shown at Acquavella’s New York location Winter of 2023.
Defined by its infusion of imagery from mass media and the American zeitgeist, Pop Art rose to prominence in America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The period is documented for its innovative techniques and sensibilities that appealed to heightened interests of mechanical reproduction. However, despite the adoption of the visual language of mass culture and consumerism, from newspaper articles to magazine and billboard advertisements, Pop artists continued to foreground the medium of painting in their practices.
In Warhol’s Four Jackies (1964), four separate canvases come together to form one precarious composition of First Lady Jackie Kennedy. Pulling from found photographs of the cultural icon—either prior to or post assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy—Warhol painted a work that not only incorporates the sensationalism of the moment but the artist also manifests a historical record of intense emotionality. Shifting from objects of commodification to celebrity figures, Warhol ascribes similar critical modalities when appropriating imagery of persons into his works, treating the repeated image of Jackie Kennedy an embodiment of American pop culture rather than a product of it. In this regard, Warhol expunges a painted surface that reflects his painterly hand and his personal interest while also reading into the communal consumption of celebrity. This contrast between individual versus collective and repetition versus singularity continued to interest artists well after Pop Art’s initial popularity.
The duality of Pop Art is represented here in an amalgamation of high and low, deconstructing previous hierarchies of culture.
