Art is considered to be a form of expression. It is used to convey ideas and emotions through visual means. As such, artists use different mediums to express their views and feelings. In the contemporary art world, popular artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Andy Warhol are known for appropriating popular objects in the world today and altering them in some way. These pop art artists have been featured in numerous art exhibits and art festivals around the world.
Tired of searching for an updated list of the most current artists? Here’s a list of contemporary artists that you can use for your reference:
1. Jeff Koons
2. Damien Hirst
3. Takashi Murakami
4. Chuck Close
5. James Rosenquist
6. Richard Prince
7. Roy Lichtenstein
8. Robert Rauschenberg
9. Andy Warhol
10. Cindy Sherman
11. Keith Haring
12. Tom Wesselmann
Artists have been making art out of popular culture since the beginning of cultural production. Here are 10 of the most influential artists who have used pop culture as a subject in their art.
Takashi Murakami
Andy Warhol
Roy Lichtenstein
Jeff Koons
Basquiat
Keith Haring
Damien Hirst
Banksy
Oscar Murillo
The Pop Art movement was a reaction to the formalism of Abstract Expressionism. Pop Art used imagery found in mass culture to make works that were accessible and that reference the consumer culture of America.
Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein used commercial images from comic books and advertisements to make paintings, called “paintings” in quotation marks to indicate that they were not serious art.
Towards the end of the 1960s, a lot of younger artists started to think that using traditional painting media was too confining. So they started to use new materials, like performance art, video art, installation art, and earthworks (sculptures made with natural materials). The media used by these artists became known as “conceptual” because their main concern was conveying an idea rather than creating a piece of visual art.
Riley created his first serigraph in 1964. He made a series of them called “Little Red Riding Hood”, but he didn’t exhibit any of them until 1965.*
Pop art is a diverse movement that has influenced and been adopted by many artists since its inception in the 1950s. Pop art is a reaction to the dominant style of Abstract Expressionism, which was abstract, emotional and often expressionistic. Pop art is more concerned with mass production, consumerism and popular culture than other contemporary art movements.
The foundation of pop art is visual, using objects from the everyday world as subject matter for the work, rather than visually representing emotions or ideas. Pop art does not rely on any one medium; many famous pop art pieces combine painting, sculpture or photography into one piece.
The term “pop” in pop art refers to the common, everyday objects used in the work rather than the commercial aspect of a piece.
Pop art emerged during a period of post-war prosperity and consumerism in America when there was a desire to reflect on American consumer culture, which was expanding following World War II. The development of pop art is attributed to both Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.*
Pop artists were influenced by the science fiction of their time, especially the pulp publications that featured stories such as Flash Gordon.
Warhol’s interest in Campbell’s soup cans is evident from a series of paintings and prints he created between 1962 and 1963 which depict the cans as icons or symbols of American culture. Although Campbell’s was not the only brand of soup to be featured in pop art paintings, it was one of his favorites due to its ubiquity at the time. Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962–64) were Warhol’s first silkscreen paintings. He used an image of the cans from a June 1962 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal to make them. “Campbell’s Soup Cans” was originally a wooden cabinet that displayed 36 canned soups, an advertising gimmick for the company.
The Warhol painting features 32 different kinds of soup, including some which no longer contain meat (such as Vegetable Beef), others that are no longer available (such as Chicken Rice), and some varieties which have been introduced since 1962 (such as Wonton). Each can is depicted frontally, with its label clearly visible. This was possible because Warhol had received permission from Elizabeth Shaw, the president of Campbell Soup Company, to use any image he
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a group of artists emerged in the United States that became known as \”The New American Painting\” or \”The New York School\” (sometimes \”The Abstract Expressionists\”) and is associated with abstract expressionism. The movement is often said to have begun with the 1944 exhibition \”Fourteen Americans,\” curated by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The painters included were Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Mark Tobey, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg and James Brooks. In 1948 they formed an organization called United Artists (UA) with a view to exhibiting their works as a group. However, this arrangement fell through.
In addition to exhibitions in commercial galleries such as Sidney Janis Gallery and Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, artists participated in large outdoor exhibitions at MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire (1948), Connecticut College (1949), the University of Illinois campus at Urbana-Champaign (1950), the Hayden Planetarium in New York (1950), and elsewhere across the U.S. West Coast.
Because of their frequent willingness to experiment
