Image: Ushio Shinohara, Doll Festival (1966) © Tokyo Gallery+BTAP
You’ve only got to look at the sheer number of pop art exhibitions that flash up each year at museum’s around the world to see the enduring influence the genre has over gallery and museum space. Whether it’s Post Pop: East Meets West at the Saatchi Gallery or the recent sale of Andy Warhol self portraits for $30 million, there’s a lot of love for the art movement that shot out of the 1950s, and the latest addition to the appreciation soup is The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop at the Tate Modern.
The installation will be opening at the modern art gallery on the 17th September 2015 with an Autumn/Winter run that will see it through until the 24th January 2016. The Tate Modern is free entry for general admission, but exhibitions usually have paid entry, but there’s no word on the price as of yet. It’s possible it could be one of their free shows, but looking at other EY exhibitions it looks likely to be £16 for admission.
The World Goes Pop has set itself a similar challenge in terms of its outlook as Post Pop: East Meets West, for which the intent was to portray the legacy of pop art and its power to bridge the divide between the east and west. The difference is that the Tate Modern exhibition will take a broader world view on the movement, looking at how artist from every corner of the planet took up the mantle of pop art to add their own take on the spirit of the far reaching movement.
In the region of 200 individual works will be drawn together, featuring artists from South America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe who contributed to the growth and spread of the principles of pop art during the 1960s and 70s. It comes on the back of new research into the genre, which highlights how it wasn’t just a celebration or critique of western consumer culture, or Eastern culture for that matter, that typified the work of its artists, but that it was a conduit for subversive creativity questioning the norms and activities of the day with an element of public protest woven within its very technicolour fabric.
Pop art may well have originated in the UK in the mid 1950 before being developed significantly by US artists in the late 50s and 1960s, but it’s clearly gone on to be an art form that has been taken up by the rest of the world. The World Goes Pop exhibition intends to show how these different cultures have gone on to contribute, re-work and respond to the success of the movement.
