Gallery of Art Prague: Prague

Salvador Dali, Alfons Mucha and Andy Warhol are not three artists you would automatically group together – but the surrealist, art nouveau, and pop-art styles complement each other in the Gallery Of Art Prague (or GOAP for short). Under the shadow of the Church of our Lady before Tyn and housed in a historic building within the city’s Old Town Square, the gallery dedicates each of its three floors to one artist. It opens with Dali, showcasing the Spanish artists’ surreal drawings, etchings, paintings and sculpture which feature imaginative and often disturbing characters and scenes. This exhibition also draws attention to his lesser known explorations into ceramics with many pieces painted directly onto plates, as well as furniture (a red sofa inspired by the actress Mae West’s lips) and cosmetics (a range of glass perfume bottles). The next floor sees a complete change in mood with the ethereal works of Mucha, as muted colours, shapes inspired by nature, seductive women with long flowing hair and delicate illustrations and advertising posters line the walls. Following the spiral staircase up to the final floor you are greeted with oversized Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo soap boxes now synonymous with Warhol. Neon pink and blue letters spell out the artist’s name, which leads onto the more typical silk-screen images of flowers, dollar bills, Marilyn Monroe and Lenin as well as album covers designed for the Rolling Stones and Velvet Underground (a bright yellow banana with the caption ‘Peel slowly and See’). Despite deploying diverse styles and techniques all three artists were united in their ability to create popular images used by global advertisers; Dali designed the logo for Chupa Chups lollipops, Mucha created posters for various products and a stage production of French actress Sarah Bernhardt, and Warhol appropriated numerous logos and created iconic album covers – and GAOP illustrates why all three continue to share mass popularity today.

For more information visit their website

Edouardo Paolozzi: Whitechapel Gallery

Eduardo Paolozzi is all over London; from the mosaics at Tottenham Court Road tube station to the sculpted head outside The Design Museum, colossal sculptures outside The British Library and on Royal Victoria Dock, and abstract pieces in Kew Gardens and Pimlico amongst others. It seems almost overdue that a London Gallery should dedicate an exhibition to the irreverent artists’ works – and Whitechapel Gallery have filled that void collating over 250 of Paolozzi’s artworks in their current retrospective. The ground floor focusses on his early career in London and Paris and his experimentation with various mediums as industrial bronze sculptures are displayed alongside pop-art inspired collages, screen-prints, tapestries and textiles, and moving film. Despite this diversity constant themes do emerge, evident in his fascination with pattern, layering and texture – and as the ground floor galleries come to an end, an inimitable Paolozzian style full of graphic prints and geometric designs emerges. His evolution as an artist is focussed on in the upper floor galleries which explore later developmental pieces in chrome and a playfulness with reflective surfaces and mirrors. It then goes on to draw out his obsession with the creative process itself, and it is interesting to view similar shapes through both two dimensional sketches and prints and three dimensional sculptures sharing the same space. Hints of the artist as a person – and indeed as a rebel – are also present in ‘Avant Garde?’ where each letter of the term is filled with a colourful cartoon figure, and ‘Jeepers Creepers’ which pokes fun at artistic terminology by featuring a row of plaster clowns each labelled with a different term. Iconic pieces mix with lesser known experiments, and the exhibition closes with the original sketches for the infamous tube mosaics. Get over to east London before 14^th May to catch this exhibition and appreciate Paolozzi’s fun, colourful and incredibly innovative contributions to 20^th century art!

For more information visit their website

Gavin Turk: Newport Street Gallery

Back in London and the forecast promised a dry, crisp wintry day so I planned a walk along the Thames to Vauxhall followed by a visit to Gavin Turk’s exhibition at Newport Street Gallery. Alas the reality proved damp and drizzly, and by the time we reach the Gallery I was mildly sulking, but the current ‘Who, What, When, Where, How & Why’ retrospective instantly improved my mood! With an exhibition title asking so many questions, it seems only natural that the show itself should continue in a similar vein, inquiring deeper into issues around identity, persona and perception. It seems appropriate that Gavin Turk is not even the artists’ real name but a persona, creating a distinction between that and his personal identity; this idea is played with further with an artwork created from Yves Klein blue sponges in the shape of his signature and an oversized faux Hello! magazine cover in the opening gallery. Turk employs other artists’ identity with noteworthy homages to Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol throughout the exhibition. One gallery is filled with pieces which could easily be mistaken for Pollack’s but on closer inspection reveal hundreds of Turks’ signature repeated across the canvas, and another pop-art inspired gallery is awash with screen-prints several of which include Turk himself depicted in Warhol’s infamous gunslinger pose. Similarly a collection of sculptural figures featuring a punk, a soldier, a vagrant, and a revolutionary hero again question cultural identities and how society perceives others by the clothes they wear. The final gallery challenges visitors’ idea of value and how we view items typically thrown away or perceived as rubbish, through a pimped up skip and discarded items created into sculptures. All these works are set against the gallery’s plain white walls and angular high ceilings which makes for a strong visual impact – and better yet, it’s free!

For more information visit their website

The World Goes Pop: Tate Modern

A “pop” of colour was just what I needed on a grey afternoon as autumn truly begins to kick in… and that’s exactly what ‘The World Goes Pop’ gave me. Each of the ten large galleries in this exhibition is painted a different bright hue; from red, to pink, green, orange, blue, yellow, turquoise and numerous shades in between. Refreshingly all of the big names typically associated with pop art (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Blake, Hamilton and Hockney) are noticeably absent, and instead the focus is on exploring how different cultures and countries such as Romania, Iran and Bratislava contributed to this phenomenon throughout the 1960’s and ‘70’s. Many common pop art themes are present including the use of mass produced imagery; most notable in the last gallery which is decorated floor to ceiling with Thomas Bayrle’s ‘The Laughing Cow’ wallpaper and displays a series of instantly recognisable logos by Yugoslavian artist Boris Bucan such as BMW, Pepsi, IBM and Texaco amongst others where the brand has been replaced with the word ‘art’, questioning how far art itself has now become a consumerist product? All of the artists on display have utilised popular global imagery to subtly address tougher issues including war, the role of women and sexual liberation, protest and civil rights. Intelligently any political message does not detract from the works as pieces of art in their own right, and I was particularly drawn to three lacquered car bonnets decorated with shapes evoking female genitalia by Judy Chicago, the only woman on an auto-body course of 250 male students. Whilst some of the pieces were not to my taste, and several are now looking a little dated (particularly those created from plastics and polymers), I certainly appreciated the exhibitions’ efforts to widen the publics gaze at pop art and present previously uncelebrated works.

For more information visit their website