POP ART - Infeld Collection

Works by Pop Art artists such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Mel Ramos, Kiki Kogelnik, and Steve Kaufman are being exhibited in Opatija for the first time. The exhibition at the Juraj Šporer Art Pavilion is a collaboration between the Croatian Museum of Tourism and the Infeld Collection.

Pop Art (from the term "popular art") emerged in the United States and Great Britain during the 1950s. The horrors of the Second World War gave way to technological progress and a flourishing consumer society. 

Pop Art moved the striking visual world of advertising and the mass media into the aesthetic focus. Suddenly, the boundaries between "low" popular culture and the "elite" forms of expression associated with the Old Masters began to blur.

From bizarre to critical, artists delivered an imaginative interpretation of commercial products. It was not about a direct adoption of what was found in everyday life: The subjects were overdrawn, distorted, fragmented, endlessly duplicated and boosted to the point of absurdity. A unique iconography and visual language was created: recognizable, reduced, expressive. 

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is the most important representative of this art movement. Alongside depictions of everyday objects - such as the iconic "Campbell’s Soup Cans"-his work is characterized by a fascination for the appearance of people - for their self-dramatization, for the obscurity of their privacy. Warhol, who knew most of the stars of show business well, portrayed them personally and privately. His portraits of Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe have become symbolic figures for many generations, are anchored in the general consciousness and serve as projection surfaces for people all over the world to express their own wishes.

The art collector and string producer Peter Infeld was portrayed by the American artist Steve Kaufman (1960-2010) in 2002. Like his former teacher Andy Warhol, Steve Kaufman works with photos. He composes these before screen printing and completes them painterly with intensive layers of color. 

Peter Infeld also knew personally the American pop master of the erotic act Mel Ramos (1935-2018). Painted in bright colors, his "Californian Venus" lolls through all the painter's creative phases. She is at once beauty queen, power woman, and goddess. In his depictions of advertising products and women's bodies, Ramos manages to convey a familiar warmth instead of a cold forced alliance between woman and commodity. 

The works of Austrian Pop Art artist Kiki Kogelnik currently appear particularly relevant. She worked in the USA alongside world-renowned fellow artists. Her works are playful, critical, and colorful, yet at the same time deeply political, revealing the hybrid nature of Pop Art: her figures are linked to the European tradition of visual art through an ideal of beauty, while simultaneously being exposed to the distorting gaze of the media.

Emerging in the 1950s, Pop Art revolutionized the art world; it sought and found beauty in everyday life, elevated it to a higher aesthetic level, and prompted critical reflection. Today, this expressive and colorful visual language forms a solid foundation for visual design on social media, where the fusion of everyday life, advertising, and art continues to evolve.