When the British critic and curator Lawrence Alloway coined the term Pop Art in 1958, this movement was still being despised by the stalwarts of “high art.” The definitive institutional validation would not come until five years later, thanks to the historic exhibition Six Painters and the Object, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. That exhibition was initially going to be called Signs and Objects, which is precisely the name of the exhibition with which the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao now honors Pop Art.
The Guggenheim Foundation, not in vain, became one of the institutions that most decisively promoted Pop Art in the 1960s, with monographic exhibitions of figures such as Chryssa, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldendurg. At the same time, he compiled a very important collection of works representative of this movement, many of which can now be visited at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Of the six authors who lent their works to that iconic New York exhibition in 1963, five are present in the Bilbao exhibition: Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol. They share exhibition space with other figures such as Hamilton himself, Oldenburg, Josephine Meckseper, Sigmar Polke and Mimmo Rotella.
The exhibition includes a total of 40 works linked to Pop Art and divided into three large exhibition spaces. The first of them, dedicated to signs, goes back to the years in which this style began to become popular, thanks to artists like Roy Lichtenstein and works as well known as Grrrrr!! or Girl with tears. In the same room you can admire Richard Hamilton’s relief works on the Guggenheim in New York, which in his opinion was one of the great icons of Pop Art, or the spectacular Flamenco Capsule by Rosenquist.
These creations are children of the time that shaped Pop Art, a period marked by the “economic dynamism and growing consumerism of American society after the Second World War,” as explained by Lauren Hinkson and Joan Young, curators of the exhibition. The works explore the “visual language of popular culture, and are inspired by advertisements, cheap magazines, newspapers, billboards, movies, comics or shop windows.”
Rosenquist, in fact, came from painting billboards and applied that technique in his artistic production, while in the case of Hamilton the influence of the world of comics is evident.
In the same room you can also enjoy two works by Andy Warhol: the Orange Disaster and his disturbing Self-Portrait, related to the theme of death.
The exhibition room dedicated to “objects”, meanwhile, includes works by artists linked to the beginnings of Pop Art such as Oldenburg or Raucschenberg, who incorporated found objects and materials such as cardboard, plastic or scrap metal in their works, as well as common images captured using transfer techniques or commercial screen printing processes. In addition, works by later artists such as José Dávila or Lucía Hierro are included.
The exhibition, finally, dedicates a room to the monumental work Volante Suave, by Oldenburg himself and Coosje van Bruggen. This is one of the 40 large-scale projects that these artists carried out between 1976 and 2008. The work, created for the rotunda of the Guggenheim in New York, visited the Guggenheim Bilbao on the occasion of its inaugural exhibition, in 1997, and a fourth century later it returns to honor one of the artistic movements most closely linked to the Guggenheim Foundation.
The exhibition Signs and Objects. Pop Art from the Guggenheim Collection can be visited until September 15, and will coexist with the recently inaugurated Giovanni Anselmo exhibition.
