CAMERA POP. Photography in the Pop Art of Warhol, Schifano & Co.
21 September 2018 - 13 January 2019
POP goes photography. CAMERA announces its September show.
The exhibition CAMERA POP. La fotografia nella Pop Art di Warhol, Schifano & Co retraces the history of the transformation of the photographic document especially in artworks, coming to a head in the 1960s. From 21 September to 13 January at CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, more than 150 works will be on show, including paintings, photographs, collages and graphic art, illustrating the variety and the extraordinary liveliness of this major trend.
Pop Art was a worldwide phenomenon, one which exploded in the 1960s in the United States and in Europe, and which rapidly spread to the rest of the world, and which in the words of Walter Guadagnini, director of CAMERA and curator of the exhibition, “revolutionised the relationship between artistic creation and society, recording the present in a neutral, photographic fashion, adopting the same models as those of the mass media to create artworks. In this sense, for Pop artists, not only was photography a source of inspiration, but also a key working tool, an essential part of such research.”
At the same time, the establishment of Pop culture also unleashed surprising energies within the world of photographers themselves, who began to come to terms directly not only with the contemporary visual panorama, but also with the transformation of the photographic document into a work of art.
Among the protagonists to be found on show, we might cite the Americans Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Ray Johnson and Rosalyn Drexler; the British Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Joe Tilson, David Hockney, Gerald Laing and Derek Boshier; the Germans Sigmar Polke and Wolf Vostell; the Italians Mimmo Rotella, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Franco Angeli, Umberto Bignardi, Gianni Bertini, Claudio Cintoli, Sebastiano Vassalli and many others.
Among the photographers, we might underline the presence of Ugo Mulas – to whom an entire room is dedicated, where the series created in the United States and that created for the Venice Biennale in 1964 will be on display – and of Tony Evans, the photographer of the protagonists of ‘Swinging London’ at the very start of the 1960s.