In 1962, SRGM curator Lawrence Alloway, who years earlier had coined the Pop art term, established 4 categories to distinguish Pop artworks: Ready-Mades or Rebuilt Objects, Objects and Flat Painting, Paintings of Objects and Paintings of Signs & Signs.
Next, grouped under those categories, you can discover some key ideas of a selection of artists included in the exhibition Signs and Objects: Pop Art from the Guggenheim Collection.
3D OBJECTS
REBUILT OBJECTS
- Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022) Key Words: THE STORE, SOFT SCULPTURES, SCALE
In 1961, Oldenburg re-created the environment of a store selling ice creams, hamburgers, clothes, etc. made of plaster and papier mâché. He would later recreate domestic objects items in colossal scale.
- Lucía Hierro (1987) Key Words: THE STORE, SOFT SCULPTURES, SCALE
Lucía Hierro renders typical products of the New York bodega (small convenience store often selling Latin American products) into oversized soft flat handsewn sculptures hanging from the gallery walls. Her sculptures rework some ideas of Pop Art, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual art, but they also bring to the fore how objects can be representative of a cultural identity.
READY-MADE
- Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) Key Words: SALVAGED MATERIAL
In 1970’s, Rauschenberg created collage works and assemblage sculptures with salvaged cardboard boxes. His choice of such an artless material highlights his interest in blurring the distinction between high art and low art.
- Jose Dávila (1974) Key Words: SALVAGED MATERIAL
Dávila reinterprets Donald Judd’s stack sculptures, but rather than with industrial materials, using cardboard boxes, thus proving that the same could be attained with less. His work tackles humorously some minimalist ideas about materials and architecture.
OBJECTS & FLAT PAINTING
ASSEMBLAGE
- Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) Key Words: PATTERNED FABRICS, HANDMADE DOTS, CONSUMER GOODS
Sigmar Polke was a member of the Capitalist Realism movement originated in 1963 in Germany, which appropriated visual strategies of the American Pop Art, also commenting on the political and social situation of the country during the postwar period.
- Jim Dine (1935) Key Words: DOMESTIC OBJECTS
In 1960 Jim Dine created The House, an environment that filled the gallery space with painted fabric, slogans written on cardboard and domestic objects in disarray, undermining the cliché of the Happy American Home. Unlike other Pop artists, Dine wasn’t interested in merging art and life, his concerns reflected on ideas like reality, representation, meaning and language.
PAINTINGS OF OBJECTS
HYPERREALISM
- James Rosenquist (1933-2017) Key Words: ADVERTISMENT, SCALE
Rosenquist earned a living as a billboard painter that featured a hyperrealist technique. His colossal paintings blended and juxtaposed enlarged fragments of popular imagery sourced from magazines and advertisements, creating an overwhelming effect on the viewer.
SILKSCREEN
- Andy Warhol (1928-1987) Key Words: CONSUMER CULTURE
Andy Warhol created a general Vanitas theme of American Society through modern still lifes that depicted food consumables, stardom, and even disasters. Through repetition, Warhol not only challenged the idea of the uniqueness of an artwork, evoking sometimes mass production of commodities, but he oftentimes also highlighted the numbing effect of reiterative exposure to violent images.
SIGNS&PAINTINGS OF SIGNS
READY-MADE
- Chryssa (1933-2013) Key Words: Neon Signs,
A pioneer in the use of neon lights as art material, Chryssa began using neon sign fragments from Times Square, deployed of their original meaning and function she transformed them into abstracted forms.
GRAPHICS
- Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) Key Words: SIGNS, COMIC BOOKS, RASTERDOTS
Lichtenstein’s mayor inspiration was comic books, he adopted its motifs and graphics to depict characters, home interiors and household objects that have been reduced to dots and lines but enlarged in scale.