In 2011, The Lightbox in Woking held a successful exhibition on British Pop Art. It has now gone further with its new exhibition that looks at international Pop Art in American and Europe.
Yet again, the Lightbox has achieved an exhibition of international quality. Curator Michael Regan has brought together works by a many well-known artists, focused on Andy Warhol, and explores the relationship between Pop Art and other popular culture of the time including comic books, pop music, advertising, Hollywood films and packaging and how Pop Art influenced many aspects of life such as fashion, textile designs, furniture and interior design.
At the entrance to the exhibition is a “taster”, with posters, pop music, record sleeves, comic books, advertising and other Pop ephemera which were instrumental in influencing the Pop Art movement where the boundaries between art and advertising were frequently blurred.
The main exhibition is laid out between two series of works by Andy Warhol. At one end of the gallery is the iconic series of ten multi-coloured screenprint portraits of Marilyn Monroe created by Andy Warhol in 1967; at the other end are a series of fabric and dress designs, some seen for the first time in Britain and one of the surprises of the exhibition. The other surprise is that we are so used to Warhol’s manipulation of images, that we forget that other artists such as Billy Apple were also doing similar experiments, here with the Presidential Suite: J.F.K and The Hathaway Shirt Man.
Artists on show from America include Roy Lichtenstein, Claus Oldenburg, George Segal, James Rosenquist and Jasper Johns, with furniture designed by Peter Murdoch and Roger Limbrick and disposal paper dresses by Harry Gordon. European Pop artists are represented by Claude Gilli, Erró and Nikki de Saint Phalle.
This is a stunning exhibition which, by showing a wide variety of work by many different artists reminds us of the breadth of the Pop Art movement, not just in art, but in many areas of fashion and design, with Andy Warhol as one of its leaders.
