Challenging the misconception that pop art was the sole domain of the white male, The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop reveals how a diversity of artists from around the world used the art movement as a protest against the market dominance of post-war US.

Taking viewers on a journey from Latin America to Asia and from Europe to the Middle East, The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop reveals how artists around the world engaged with the spirit of pop.

The exhibition, which is being held at the Tate Modern, brings together some 160 works from the 1960s and 1970s, the great majority of which have never been shown in the UK before. These works explore the traditional story of pop art and show how different cultures contributed, re-thought and responded to the movement. Pop art is generally considered an Anglo-American phenomenon, a knowing but unconflicted reflection on modern commercial culture, associated with such artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Pop was never just a celebration of Western consumerism,but was often a subversive international language for criticism

This exhibition reveals the alternative stories of pop, highlighting key figures of the era who have often been left out of mainstream art history. It also posits that pop was never just a celebration of Western consumerism, but was often a subversive international language for criticism and public protest across the globe.

Reacting to the market and media dominance of post-war America, pop art arose in many countries and communities as an overtly political, destabilising force.

The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop shows how artists used this visual language to critique its capitalist origins, while benefiting from its mass appeal and graphic power.

The exhibition includes the Austrian Kiki Kogelnik’s anti-war sculpture Bombs in Love 1962, and the subverted commercial logos of Boris Bucan in Croatia. Pop’s comic-book blondes and advertising models have become familiar images of the idealised female body, but this exhibition also reveals the many women artists who presented alternative visions.

The pop body could be complex and visceral instead, like Brazilian Anna María Maiolino’s brightly coloured sculpture of digestive organs Glu, Glu, Glu  or the paintings of cut-up and isolated body parts by Slovakia’s Jana Želibská and Argentina’s Delia Cancela.

The exhibition also showcases many other women artists who played key roles in the movement, including Evelyne Axell, Eulàlia Grau, Nicola L, Marta Minujin and Martha Rosler, challenging the traditional cast of male figures who have come to dominate pop’s canon. Pop art is also traditionally associated with the hyper-individualised consumer and the isolated celebrity icon, but global pop artists often found the amassed crowd to be a more potent symbol of contemporary culture.

Icelandic artist Erró’s American Interiors  showed throngs of Chinese workers invading domestic Western scenes, while Brazilian Claudio Tozzi’s Multitude and Spanish-based Equipo Crónica’s Concentration or Quantity Becomes Quality showed the modern energy and antagonism of crowds in sharp contrast to American pop’s remote icons like Marilyn and Elvis.

Other artists even united a Pop aesthetic with their own folk traditions, bringing together contemporary imagery with local practices. The exhibition shows many such variations from across the globe, from Judy Chicago’s decorated car hoods to Beatriz Gonzalez’s painted Colombian dining table to Ushio Shinohara’s ‘popped’ versions of 19th-century Japanese prints.

This exhibition also reveals the many women artists who presented alternative visions

The exhibition is part of a major arts partnership between EY and Tate, which has now been renewed for a further three years until 2018. The partnership has already supported successful and widely acclaimed exhibitions, all of which shed new light on major figures and moments in art history.

It is being curated by Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation and Flavia Frigeri, curator at the Tate Modern, with Elsa Coustou as assistant curator.

A number of events are being organised to support the exhibition. November 17 sees artists Martha Rosler and Sanja Ivekovic exploring how pop art of the 1960s and 1970s became a global language of subversion. A private view of the exhibition is being held on December 14 especially for young people aged between 15 and 25.

A number of related films are also being screen on Friday (Good Morning Michelangelo), Saturday (The Rome School) and next Sunday (Was it Pop? and The North Wind). Full information about venues and time is available online.

The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop runs until January 22.

www.tate.org.uk

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