Portraits Go Pop!

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei is delighted to present Portraits Go Pop !, a themed exhibition of contemporary portraiture. Opening on January 18th, the exhibition delves into the subtle resonance that transcends eras between contemporary portraiture and Pop Art.

Pop art is often seen as an art of objects. From Jasper Johns’ Beer Cans and Flags to Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans, Brillo Boxes and Coke Bottles; from Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoons and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures to Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes and hotdogs: Pop art is famous for the way in which it sought to portray modern human experience through the endless glut of objects that fills our consumer-orientated world. Yet, while it appeared to venerate the modern consumer object, along with its logos and signs, Pop art was also very much an art of the portrait – one of Pop art’s distinguishing characteristics was its portrayal of people as if they were objects and objects as if they were people.

It was essentially Pop art that provided a visual language for individuals to negotiate and explore the complexities of personal, public and private life in a modern, media-dominated, mass-industrial complex. And, as the work of the various artists that have been gathered in this exhibition, Portraits Go Pop, demonstrate, the same remains true today. It is, after all, the very same qualities that Pop art first invested in the portrait that now have once more been taken up by a whole range of 21st-century artists as a means of addressing the confusion and anxiety involved in today’s often complicated concepts of selfhood and identity. And once again, it is the same techniques of Pop art portraiture that many of these artists now employ to articulate something of the disappearing borderlines between the virtual and the real and to convey a sense of the increasingly difficult role and function of the individual in a mass-collective culture of perpetual interconnectivity, instant access and image-overload.

Almost all the portraits on show in Portraits Go Pop! present the “sitters” of their paintings as some sort of artifice, avatar or construct. The great variety of figures on display in these 21st-century “Pop” portraits are all essentially approximations or projections of a person, an identity, or a character. Although many of these pictures make use of the traditional techniques of oil-on-canvas, these “portraits” are not at all attempts at portraying a person’s inner being, essence or soul, in the traditional manner of Old Master portraiture. Indeed, the whole question of a person’s essence, of a real self, or inner identity appears to be deliberately thrown open to question by these works. The function of the figures in these paintings is, it seems, to serve as masks, avatars or alter-egos; mere vehicles behind which their creators can both hide and either articulate their own feelings or invite the viewer to project theirs onto them. They are, in this respect, proxy portraits or proxy-self-portraits of the kind that first made their appearance in the early 1960s in paintings such as Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece or Mr Bellamy when cartoon figures served the artist, somewhat whimsically, as partial stand-ins for his own more hidden thoughts.