Free exhibition includes works by Andy Warhol and Chileans Francisco J. Smythe and Patrick Hamilton.
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With samples of works by prominent and renowned artists such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Tilson and Schnabel, among others, this Wednesday, July 6, in AIEP Art Room the Pop Art exhibition is inaugurated, a private collection of Hernan Garfiascurator and director of the AIEP School of Design, Art and Communication.
The free exhibition, which will be available throughout July at the AIEP Art Gallery located at 820 Triana, also includes a significant number of books and catalogues, as well as works by some Chilean artists related to this 20th-century art movement.
Among these are Francisco J. Smythe with his graphic work and Patrick Hamilton with his look at comics, in addition to the young artist Camila Ramírez. “Each piece of the exhibited collection is original, some unique, others serialized, accompanied by everyday objects and my collection of catalogs and books of the exhibited artists,” comments Hernán Garfias.
Pop Art, he explains, began in the late 1950s in London with artists like Edoardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, David Hockney and Joe Tilson. However, he points out, it exploded in New York in the 1970s with Andy Warhol as the most popular artist of the group “where Robert Rauschenberg was, for me the most relevant of all of them, as well as Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselman, Claus Oldenburg and Robert Indiana,” he says.
Garfias adds that Pop Art is a reflection of the consumer society, popular music, Hollywood cinema, graphic design, packaging, “Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Campbell’s soups, Brillo detergent, but at the same time the Kennedys, the space race, the electric chair, sexual diversity, the Vietnam War, the hippies, the flower revolution and everything that marked history in the years after World War II.”
And, he highlights, a reflection of a United States of America that became the great power, with its capitalist model and the emergence of a new powerful, satisfied and educated middle class. “Hence my fascination with this part of the history of art which was, in my opinion, the first approach to the masses, democracy, freedom and diversity”, he says. “Pop Art meant reflecting the consumer society, Hollywood cinema, comics, advertising and music, which is part of everyone’s daily life to this day,” he concludes.
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