Pop Art Design at Barbican Art Gallery

Think ‘Pop Art’ and you might conjure up thoughts of Warhol’s iconic soup cans, Litchenstein’s dotted, graphic ‘Explosion’ or Hamilton’s kitsch collages with which the movement has become synonymous. But, walking around the Barbican’s current exhibition, Pop Art Design, it’s immediately evident that these Pop artists’ enduring legacy spreads much further than that.

With its origins in post-war UK and US economic booms, and their sudden proliferation of celebrity, commodity and media culture, Pop Art fostered a new dialogue between artists and designers. A two-way conversation which saw artists take inspiration from the symbols, brands and media publications of the time and, in turn, designers responding with their own artistic comment on this exciting multi-platform creative landscape. What resulted was a new landscape of less snobbery and more accessibility, a blurring of the lines between art and consumerism occurred and is expertly exhibited here.

Entering the exhibition feels like entering a department store in a parallel universe. I wasn’t around in the 1960s but my mother assures me, this is as close as you can get. A section of album covers, concert posters and works including Hamilton’s 1967 ‘Swingeing London’, the infamous depiction of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Foster shielding their faces from photographers following their appearance in court on drugs charges, feels so personal and accurate it’s like snooping around someone’s bedroom.

Moving through to the ‘lounge’ where Evelyne Axell’s overtly sexual ‘Ice Cream’ hangs seductively above Allen Jones’ controversial ‘Chair’. An arresting piece of a woman’s doubled-over, legs-in-the-air shape offered up as a chair. Sounds offensive but against the exhibition’s ironic backdrop, it seems to communicate more of a suspicious questioning of the era’s new found sexual freedoms but staid, entrenched misogyny.

A sense of liberty among these protagonists is tangible. Of pushing the boundaries and experimenting with new materials, newly emerging technologies and otherwise unexplored inspirations. Gaetano Pesce’s vacuum-packed chair ‘Donna’, which slowly takes its shape on unpacking, is undeniably anthropomorphic but is also clearly the work of a design-led mind, scientific in its origin. While Elaine Sturtevant’s ‘Raysse Tableau à Haute Tension’ incorporates neon lips and Ettore Sottsass and Tomás Maldonado’s early computer perfectly portrays this stylish science crossover.

Tellingly, so many of the iconic shapes, styles and designs on display here as modern inventions of the time are so recognisable to us now they are almost hidden. A Braun toaster from 1961 is achingly cool in its sleek simplicity while chairs, household wares and even Tupperware represent originators of form which, today, would be deemed classics.

I only wish the similar explosion of consumerism, homogenisation and access to celebrities which we are experiencing today had prompted such an inquisitive response. A thought which made this beautiful exhibition seem more relevant today than I ever would have considered.

Download the free Pop Art Design app and learn more about some of the exhibition’s key works through the voices of Pop: www.barbican.org.uk/apps

Pop Art Design is open until Sunday 9 February at:

Barbican Centre
Silk Street
Barbican
EC2Y 8DS