This text is part of the special Museums notebook
In the heart of winter and under Sherbrooke Street, pop art displays all its shapes and colors.
Critics of pop art have been rehashing the same arguments since the birth of this movement in the 1950s: simple copying and pasting of advertising images; misappropriation of everyday objects that galleries and museums ennoble by their mere presence in these places; abusive use of materials and techniques relating to industrial logic, such as plastic or acrylic paint.
Iris Amizlev has heard these criticisms many times, and they only seem to strengthen her admiration for this period which marked the second half of the 20th century.e century. Curator of community projects and engagement at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), she is also curator of the exhibition Pop life!, inaugurated last September. This was presented on the sidelines of the major retrospective devoted to the American-Colombian artist Marisol, an important figure in this movement.
His flamboyant sculptures have since left the MMFA, but the pleasure that Pop life! will continue until next July. Iris Amizlev will not complain, even if she has to rotate the works on paper, which are the most sensitive to light, a few times. This is how the famous Mao by Andy Warhol, who proudly featured in the first version of the exhibition, has returned to the shadows. But more than 70 works still inhabit this strategic space of the museum, an underground passage between the Jean-Noël Desmarais and Michal and Renata Hornstein pavilions, offering the visitor a beautiful passageway.
Juggling with images
Born in England and the United States shortly after the Second World War, pop art became both “a celebration and a critique of popular culture,” says Iris Amizlev while strolling among the pieces she chosen with care. One might believe that transforming images of cigarette packets, comic book characters or canned meat was provocative. For the curator, we must take into account the context that pushed several artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Eduardo Paolozzi and David Gilhooly to choose this path. “Expressionist and abstract painting, dominant at that time, represented the inner universe of creators,” explains this doctoral student in art history from the University of Montreal. Faced with this, pop art advocated the opposite, using images and subjects taken from the outside world to introduce them into galleries and museums to make art. It was simply revolutionary! »
As if we were in the middle of a department store, Pop life! presents different sections recalling the familiar character of our own home. From the living room to the kitchen, we are faced with an eclectic choice of bookcases, chairs, armchairs and sofas – one of which is covered in leopard skin. Some furniture and accessories, including a Nesso lamp, famous for its shimmering orange mushroom shape, look like they came from the film Clockwork Orangeby Stanley Kubrick.
Pop art “made in” Quebec
This thematic exhibition is the second by Iris Amizlev, after Ecologies — Ode to our planetpresented in 2021-2022 and occupying the same space as Pop life! For the curator, it is a unique opportunity to exhibit works from the MMFA, but kept away from the public eye. During her visits to the reserves, she unearthed “real gems from local artists” offering some beautiful examples of the ti-pop movement, a typically Quebec reinterpretation of American pop art.
Among its proud representatives in the exhibition, we find Chantal DuPont (A flower in the mouth), Gilles Boisvert (Women), Guy Montpetit (Two cultures, one nation, no 4)Jean Noël (Purple egg) and Edmund Alleyn (Iceberg Blues). Whether they are sculptures or paintings, their playful nature coupled with a hint of irony immediately catches the visitor’s eye, giving the whole a new vision of this movement.
A Quebec creator of Ti-Pop stands out in the exhibition: Pierre Ayot (1943-1995). Iris Amizlev’s curiosity led her to one of her works without visual support, within the museum catalog. Like Andy Warhol’s Brillo laundry soap boxes, she discovers that Ayot has opted for… Martini & Rossi! And a few steps away, in the middle of an oven that needs a good cleaning, Ayot has embedded a video showing the cooking of a chicken on a spit: the whole thing lasts about two hours, if you’re ever looking for a moment of culinary contemplation!
Andy Warhol said he loved sweets and “ordinary ordinary” things. Judging by the diversity of styles, materials and subjects in Pop life!, he was not the only one who wanted to transform the mundane. Under the magnifying glass of pop art lovers, a cactus can become a coat rack, and a chair, catapult us into full science fiction, especially next to a work like Lunar Rocketby Eddie Squires.
All these artists were swimming in euphoria and carefreeness? Pop life! takes us back to it without inviting us to get rid of our critical spirit… and a sometimes ironic smile in the face of some of their flamboyant bravado.
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