Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
By PAUL LASTER, May 2017
Although new art movements may be few and far between nowadays, Pop Art continues to prevail. Emerging in Britain and the United States in the 1950s, the Pop Art movement reached its peak in the 1960s but never completely lost its influence. Embraced again by postmodernist artists, woven into the Neo-Geo aesthetic, and important to a younger generation of both studio and street artists in Europe, Asia and the Americas, Pop Art still packs a punch.
Surveying the works at Art New York, which takes place at Pier 94 through May 7, one finds that Pop Art is the most visible thread linking works from the past to the present. Andy Warhol is the most exhibited artist, with editions from his Campbell Soup, Marilyn and Mao series in highest demand, while Damien Hirst, with his skull, star and butterfly spin paintings on paper, is not far behind in his popularity here.
Other artists from the first generation of Pop Art are also on hand, with David Benrimon Fine Art exhibiting a small version of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, Waterhouse & Dodd showing a preliminary drawing for a painting of a bedroom scene by Tom Wesselmann and Archeus/Post-Modern presenting David Hockney prints that the artist made on a office color copy machine and works on paper by Ed Ruscha, including silkscreen editions of his famous rendering of a Standard gas station—an iconic image in the Pop Art canon.
Ironically, Vik Muniz uses Ruscha’s celebrated gas station image as the point of departure for his 2008 photograph Norm’s on Fire, after Ruscha (from Pictures of Cars) at Zemack Contemporary Art. Employing a similar postmodernist twist on the past, Carole A. Feuerman brings Roy Lichtenstein’s famous 1961 painting Girl with Ball to mind in her realistic 2017 sculpture Miniature Brooke with Beach Ball at C24 Gallery, Mr. Brainwash references Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans in his 2016 stenciled street art piece Einstein at Contessa Gallery and street artist Ame72 humorously portrays a Lego character making a signature Damien Hirst spot painting in his spray-painted canvas at ZK Gallery.
Long past but not forgotten, Pop Art still reigns—at least in the gallery’s booths at Art New York.
Scroll through to see more of our Pop Art picks at the fair. WM
Paul Laster is a writer, editor, curator, artist and lecturer. He’s a contributing editor at ArtAsiaPacific and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art and writer for Time Out New York, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, Galerie Magazine, Sculpture, Art & Object, Cultured, Architectural Digest, Garage, Surface, Ocula, Observer, ArtPulse, Conceptual Fine Arts and Glasstire. He was the founding editor of Artkrush, started The Daily Beast’s art section, and was art editor of Russell Simmons’ OneWorld Magazine, as well as a curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, now MoMA PS1.
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