POP ART DESIGN

Pop Art is widely regarded as the most significant artistic movement since 1945. Reflecting on the cult of celebrity, commodity fetishism and media reproduction that permeated everyday life in the postwar era, Pop Art continues to shape our society’s cultural self-understanding to this day. A central characteristic of Pop Art was the dialogue between design and art, which is now being explored in “Pop Art Design” at the Vitra Design Museum as the first-ever comprehensive exhibition on the topic. 

Works by Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein or Judy Chicago are paired with design objects by Charles Eames, George Nelson, Achille Castiglioni and Ettore Sottsass. The exhibition is supplemented with a multitude of further exhibits, such as album covers, magazines, films and photos of contemporary interiors. Fifty years after the official declaration of Pop Art in a conference at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition “Pop Art Design” thus paints a new picture of Pop Art – one that finally recognises the central role played by design.

With its pointed juxtaposition of exhibits from the fields of art and design, the exhibition presents a fascinating panorama of a past era and also offers new insights for both disciplines. It shows how design was an equal dialogue partner for Pop Art, in some cases even the lead impetus. At the same time, it demonstrates that many everyday objects and the Radical Design of the 1960s were serious facets of the Pop movement. Instead of merely celebrating the zeitgeist of an epoch, the exhibition seeks to take a more detailed look at the Pop phenomenon: at the migration of motifs between art and design, at the relationship between everyday object and image and, not least, at how everyday life first came under the still-dominant influence of pop culture. This perspective holds particular relevance today as it examines Pop Art’s relationship to our own daily lives and the consumer culture that remains so omnipresent. Even if many proponents of Pop Art remained deliberately ambiguous in their stance toward such issues, one of the movement’s historical achievements lies in continually bringing renewed awareness to these questions. The exhibition unites 140 works, half of them artworks and half design objects, supplemented with numerous photographs, documents, films and texts. The highlights of the exhibition include an early screen designed by Warhol (1958), a “Target Painting” by Jasper Johns (1957), the sofa “Leonardo” which has hardly ever been exhibited since it was first produced, Roy Lichtenstein’s large-scale “Yellow Brushstroke” (1965), James Rosenquist’s “I Love You with My Ford” (1961), the monumental floor lamp “Moloch” by Gaetano Pesce (1970-71) and Allen Jones’s “Chair” (1969).

Numerous workshops, film screenings and other events and activities round out the programme:

November 7th 

Mathias Schwartz-Clauss, curator of the exhibition »Pop Art Design«, presents the exhibition in a Wednesday matinee

November 8th

Chris Rehberger is one of Germany’s most successful graphic designers while his brother Tobias numbers among the most significant contemporary artists. The brothers will talk about Pop Art, pop culture and the boundaries between fine and applied art.

November 15th

The products of the company Apple are icons of our time and Apple founder Steve Jobs was one of the few entrepreneurs with pop star status. The Hamburg-based design theorist Friedrich von Borries discusses the spectrum of pop culture, media and cult products – from Dieter Rams to Jonathan Ive, head designer at Apple.

November 22th

Comics and illustrations played a central role in Pop Art. One of today’s most prominent German graphic artists is Mirko Borsche, who designs the Zeit Magazin among others. With Anette Gehrig, director of the Cartoonmuseum Basel, Borsche will discuss comics, illustration art and drawing in a digital age.

November 29th

With sounds that evoke percussion and keyboard instruments, the young musicians of the group ATOM will enter into a dialogue with the exhibited objects. The Vitra Design Museum presents this unique experience in cooperation with VIER JAHRESZEITEN RIEHEN.

The Vitra Design Museum is dedicated to the research and presentation of design, past and present, and examines its relationship to architecture, art and everyday culture.  It was founded in 1989 by the company Vitra and its owner Rolf Fehlbaum. It has its headquarters in a building by the California architect Frank Gehry. Originally envisioned as a private collector’s museum, the museum initially produced smaller exclusive exhibitions, such as on Erich Dieckmann or the then little-known Ron Arad. In the 1990s, the first major internationally acclaimed exhibitions were presented by the museum, including retrospectives on Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright and Luis Barragán along with influential thematic exhibitions on Czech Cubism and the future of mobility. Parallel to this, the museum initiated its highly successful system of travelling exhibitions and began to develop its own product lines to help finance the programme of cultural activities. At the same time, the museum’s collection was continually expanded and an independent publishing house was established. In 2011, the museum inaugurated a second exhibition space, the Vitra Design Museum Gallery. Since 2012, an initial selection from the collection can be viewed online.

In the main museum building, the museum annually mounts two major temporary exhibitions. Smaller parallel shows are presented in the Vitra Design Museum Gallery.

POP ART DESIGN
Duration: 13 October 2012 – 03 February 2013
Hours: Daily 10 am – 6 pm
Guided tours: Every Saturday, Sunday and holiday at 11 am

Artists: Richard Artschwager, Peter Blake, César, Judy Chicago, Alan D'Arcangelo, Öyvind Fahlström, Lee Friedlander, Richard Hamilton, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Allen Jones, Edgar Kaufman, Konrad Klapheck, William Klein, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Niki de Saint Phalle, Peter Stämpfli, Saul Steinberg, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann

Designers: Eero Aarnio, Gunnar Aagard Andersen, Saul Bass, Achille und Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Luigi Colani, Charles und Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, Milton Glaser, Herbert Hirche, Loretta Li, Paolo Lomazzi, Roberto Lucci, Olivier Mourgue, George Nelson, Verner Panton, Pierre Paulin, Gaetano Pesce, Paul Rand, Gino Sarfatti, Carla Scolari, Ettore Sottsass, Studio 65, Studio DA, Superstudio, Massimo Vignelli