The museum presents Danish Pop Art

Up until the 13. september 2009 we are proud to present Danish Pop art from our own collection of paintings, collages, graphics, sculptures, combine painting and installations

 At Funen Art Museum you can see works by Stig Brøgger, Paul Gernes, Peter Holst Henckel, Poul Janus Ipsen, Bent Karl Jacobsen, Einer Jensen, Per Kirkeby, Albert Mertz, Peder Rasmussen, Karl Åge Riget and Kurt Trampedach.

For this exhibition a richly illustrated 8 page booklet has been made. In the booklet you can find information about the individual works and pop art in general.

 

The term pop art is an abbreviation of  popular art. It is an artistic expression which appeared simultaneously in England and the U.S - independently of each other - during the late 1950's, and which made its mark later here in Denmark. The mainly figurative trend targeted an audience of all walks of life, and it lasted about 20 years.

One of the earliest British pop artists, Richard Hamilton, characterized the new trend as "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business".

In 1957, the British art critic, Lawrence Alloway, first labelled the new trend pop art, and explained about its roots in the visual bombardment of consumerism and pop culture: commercials, journals, life style and fashion magazines, radio and television, cartoons, etc. Exactly the unpersonal and mass-produced images, which to a still greater extent had been saturating everyday life, inspired the artists to abandon the individual expression and intellectual approach of the past, and instead embrace the image concepts and wide target group of the mass media. However, this manifested itself with an ironical distance, which demanded a mental strength that had appeared at the time along with an increase of material wealth and production, during which people had distanced themselves to the poverty and lack of resources experienced during Second World War.

One of the most famous pop artists, Andy Warhol, who previously worked as a commercial illustrator for fashion magazines, used the motto "if something is good, why isn't a hundred copies of the same thing much better?" For this purpose, he transferred serigraphy - often combined with photographs - to canvas; a job he trusted the assistants in his studio, appropriately named The Factory. Warhol found much of his inspiration in journals and magazines. Everything from glamorous photographs of celebrities to documentary photographs and consumer product packings were used. With a firm grasp, this popular imagery was simplified, colourized, greatly enlarged and mass-produced.