Can it: Pop Art comes to town
WARHOL To Walker: American Prints From Pop Art To Today comes to The Atkinson from Saturday, January 13 to Saturday, March 10.
A revolutionary and enduring change in the production, marketing and consumption of prints took place in the 1960s.
Inspired by the monumental, bold and eyecatching imagery of postwar America, a young generation of artists took to printmaking with enthusiasm, putting it on an equal footing with painting and sculpture, matching their size, bright colour and impact.
The growth of an affluent middle class in urban America also opened a booming market for prints that was seized upon by enterprising publishers, print workshops and artists.
Focusing on modern and contemporary American printmaking, this exhibition features nine key works from the British Museum’s print collection.
The exhibition opens with the bold imagemaking of three of the greatest printmakers from the Pop Art period: Warhol, Johns and Rauschenberg, whose work took varied inspiration from the mass media consumer society of 1960s America.
The progress and creativity of printmaking through some of the most dynamic and turbulent years in US history is followed right to the present day, with prints by a relatively young AfricanAmerican artist, Kara Walker, and the recent work of one of the giants of the field, the octogen narian Jim Dine.
This exhibition follows t the major British Museum exhibition The American Dream: Pop To P Present, sponsored by Morgan Stanley and supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, w which traced the creative m momentum of American art over the past six decades using more than 200 w works by 70 artists.
Gallery opening times: Monday to Saturday 10am-4pm, Sunday closed (except during S Sefton school holidays).
This is a British Museum Partnership Exhibition, supported by the Dorset Foundation in memory of Harry M Weinrebe.