American Pop Art: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Indiana, Haring is therethe exhibition, created in collaboration with Federica Moro, follows the success of Andy Warhol, A Private View, made last year always by M45 .
The new exhibition will therefore expand the boundaries of research to all of American Pop Art, a movement capable of embodying and describing the visual revolution that occurred in the perception of the Western and consumerist world starting from the post-war period.
The fragments from the world of mass media that first constituted material for the New Dada assemblages of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, became material for Pop Art Andy Warhol, present at the exhibition with the iconic portrait of Marilyn, the very famous “Campbell's Soup”, as well as “Mickey Mouse” from 1981, from the Myths series dedicated by the artist to typically American “mythological subjects”.
The exhibition continues with several silkscreen prints by Roy Lichtenstein, among which "Shipboard girl” from 1965 and the later “Woman in Bath”, in which the artist interrupts the temporal continuity of the comic strip and takes a detail, significant from the point of view of form, not of the story. The image taken is reproduced on an unusual scale, enlarged, so as to highlight the typographic screen, the ben – day that will become the stylistic figure of the artist.
The exhibition itinerary is enriched with “Love” from 1966, a large tapestry of Robert Indiana and a work that over the years has become a true icon of Pop Art. Inspired by road signs, numbers, shop signs, billboards and commercial logos, Indiana's vocabulary alludes to a process of stripping away language that aims for stylistic essentiality, a formal and conceptual approach in which every letter becomes an image and every word is transformed into sculpture or painting.
An iconic and highly recognisable vocabulary also characterises the language of Keith Haring, present in the exhibition with several silkscreens, including a self-portrait, the result of a collaboration with Warhol in 1986 and “Pop Shop VI” from 1989, in which Haring represents one of his most distinctive figures. The American artist creates a language capable of merging meaning and aesthetics, characterized by a system of graphic signs, lines, shapes and figures, a peculiar visual vocabulary that has become a sort of universal alphabet.
The exhibition – on display from 11 October to 29 November 2024, can be visited by appointment at M45, in via Manzoni 45 in Milan.
