Kunsthaus Zurich
Heimplatz 1
CH 8001 Zurich
+41 (0)44 253 84 84
Europop
February 15-May 12, 2008

Europop offers proof of the proposition that Pop Art is not an American invention. The exhibition traces the artistic attitudes and modes of expression typical of the 1950s and 1960s beginning in London, where the term Pop Art was coined around 1955, and proceeding to Paris, Düsseldorf and Milan. With over 80 major pieces from more than ten European countries, Kunsthaus Zürich makes a case for the continuing relevance of one of the most intensive and influential artistic schools of the 20th century. The exhibition is arranged by motif, under the headings Consumerism, Spectacle, Media, and Leisure.

In the mid-1950s, artists on both sides of the Atlantic began to think creatively about the visual culture of the mass media. The Kunsthaus exhibition, curated by Tobia Bezzola and Franziska Lentzsch, examines the way European artists like Sigmar Polke, David Hockney, Niki de Saint Phalle and Gerhard Richter felt about this new concern, and how they dealt with it in their work. A detailed survey featuring pieces from both public and private collections demonstrates the broad spectrum of artistic reactions, whether idiosyncratic or born of a particular environment, to Pop’s signal preoccupations: Consumerism, Spectacle, Media, and Leisure.

As with Dada, Pop Art's ancestor in the family tree of art history, Pop Art is not primarily a matter of technique, form or style, but rather of attitude. The range includes plain naïveté and admiring emulation; an ironic, caricaturist’s way with the icons of billboards and glossy weeklies; critical, at times subversive commentary; and finally, the cynic’s exploitative borrowing of the expressive vocabulary of commercial art.

The rise of Pop Art was a symptom of a completely new phenomenon, the mutual influence and dependency of western Europe and the USA in the postwar period. Contemporary art production on the two continents had achieved a level of similarity that would have been unthinkable previously. American mass culture was pressed into military-industrial service during the Cold War, and soon Hollywood movies, jukeboxes, comic strips and rock and roll records were as ubiquitous in France, Germany and other western European nations as were the paintings of American artists, increasingly on show in local museums. This wave of Americanization was reflected in the art of the era as a tension between the old world and the new, and it is not a coincidence that the expression Pop Art was first used in London. As the Kunsthaus show proves conclusively, Pop was not and could not be an American invention. The art historians surveyed here make it clear that there would have been no Europop without American culture, and no American Pop Art without the avant-garde movements (Dada, Surrealism) of the old world. Pop Art is thus a side-effect of the far-reaching cultural fusion of two continents.

Works by the following artists were chosen to represent the spectrum of European Pop Art: Thomas Bayrle, Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, KP Brehmer, Erró, Öyvind Fahlström, Franz Gertsch, Domenico Gnoli, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Alain Jacquet, Allen Jones, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Konrad Lueg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Phillips, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sigmar Polke, Martial Raysse, Gerhard Richter, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Peter Stämpfli and Wolf Vostell. Celebrated single pieces by Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein were selected as an index of the duality of Pop’s trans-Atlantic career.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (Dumont, 316 p., approx. 160 ill.). The contributors to this German-English bilingual publication (Tobia Bezzola, Walter Grasskamp, Catherine Grenier and John-Paul Stonard) go beyond a general definition of European Pop Art to examine German and British Pop Art, analyse the work of Richard Hamilton, and consider Nouveau Réalisme, a movement which prefigured much of Pop Art.