黑料不打烊

Leila Heller Gallery is proud to unveil Pop Sculpture / Pop Culture, an exhibition of select three-dimensional works from leaders of the Pop sculpture movement, on view from September 18 U November 15 at our 43 West 57th Street location. The exhibition presents iconic sculptures by the most prominent Pop sculptors from the 1960s to the contemporary artists whom they have influenced.

Pop Sculpture / Pop Culture marks the 100th anniversary of Marcel Duchamp鈥檚 鈥渞eadymades鈥� of 1914, which influenced the entire school of Pop and inspired artists thereafter to further develop the themes he initiated. But Pop is also a testament to its times, the 1950s and 鈥�60s as well as the modern day. Both eras saw a radical shift to an increasingly mass-produced, commoditized, and packaged lifestyle. Without morals or metaphors, Pop documents this historica era in which the object is re-evaluated for its aesthetics and ubiquity above its function. By the 1960s, Pop Art had blazed into superstardom. The movement introduced the crossover of high and low culture, producing some of the most indelible and witty images of the twentieth century. Artists from across Europe-- France, England, Italy, and Sweden-- and the United States revolutionized painting and sculpture by depicting everyday, mass-produced objects that had never before been seriously considered as material or content for art. As Richard Hamilton defined the movement in 1957: 鈥淧op Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short term solution), Expendable (easily-forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business鈥� This is just the beginning鈥︹��
Of the rapid succession of artistic movements that metamorphosed in the twentieth century, Pop Art was the only movement that tried to make viewers look at everything in the world with pleasure as an aesthetic object. With the arrival of Pop, the 鈥減ower of objects,鈥� Claes Oldenburg explained, was unleashed. Artists rediscovered the daily  object, freeing it of its banal environment and rendering it without artistic pretensions or through the conversion of metaphor. This new form of art stimulated a fresh aesthetic experience with the neutral, universal language of the object. Pop Art transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, the common into the uncommon. Pop Sculpture / Pop Culture celebrates the spirit of common object and the evolution of its representation in three-dimensional form for the past 50 years. 1964 marks the year that Andy Warhol鈥檚 sculptural Brillo and Campbell鈥檚 tomato juice boxes so forcefully shook the art world and pushed the boundaries of what constituted art, as well as the time when Robert Indiana first appropriated the word LOVE in his iconic text image.
This exhibition also includes works by first generation Pop pioneers such as Richard Artschwager, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann, and traces the movement to the artists  of  this  century  who  have  extended  Pop鈥檚  vision,  such  as  Yayoi  Kusama,  Jack Pierson,  Tracey  Emin,  Paola  Pivi,  among  others.  In  this  stimulating  show, Warhol鈥檚 statement  that Pop  changed  the way  the world  saw  itself  is evident:    鈥淥nce you  鈥榞ot鈥� Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you  could  never  see  America  the  same  way  again. The moment you label something, you take a step 鈥� I mean, you can never go back again to  seeing  it  unlabelled.  We  were  seeing  the  future  and  we  knew  it  for  sure鈥� 鈥�the mystery  was  gone,  but  the  amazement  was  just  starting.鈥� Indeed,  the  Pop  Art  era foresaw the direction in which society was moving, empowering a half century of artists to search the objects that surround us for pleasure and power.