The Louis Vitton Foundation from the 16 October 2024 to the 24 February 2025, will present “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…”, an exhibition dedicated to Pop Art, one of the main artistic movements of the 60s.
The exhibition will focus on Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) – one of the leading figures of the movement – through a selection of 150 paintings and works in various materials. The exhibition will also present 70 works by 35 artists of different generations and nationalities who share a common sensibility for “Pop” – from its Dadaist roots to its contemporary manifestations, and from the 20s to the present day. In addition to works by Tom Wesselmann, the exhibition will include works by Derrick Adams, Ai Weiwei, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Evelyne Axell, Thomas Bayrle, Frank Bowling, Marcel Duchamp, Rosalyn Drexler, Sylvie Fleury, Lauren Halsey, Richard Hamilton, David Hammons, Jann Haworth, Barkley L. Hendricks, Jasper Johns, KAWS, Kiki Kogelnik, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Claes Oldenburg, Meret Oppenheim, Eduardo Paolozzi, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, James Rosenquist, Kurt Schwitters, Marjorie Strider, Do Ho Suh, Mickalene Thomas, Andy Warhol, Tadanori Yokoo…
The curators of the exhibition Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer
More than just a retrospective, Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &… will contextualize Tom Wesselmann's work within art history and offer fascinating perspectives on Pop Art, past, present and even future. In the late 1950s, Pop Art spread to both sides of the Atlantic, to North America and Europe. Comics, advertisements, cinema, celebrities, food processors and tabloids all became pictorial subjects. When they were not actual paintings, they were photographic images glued or mechanically reproduced onto the canvas. Pop Art celebrates, with a certain ambiguity, the union between art and popular culture, between museums and galleries and the cultural industry. Manifestoless and borderless, Pop Art names an aesthetic that extends far beyond the artistic realm and prevails to this day. It is difficult to say when Pop Art began, and certainly impossible to close its chapter.
It is this premise of a timeless Pop Art, “Pop Forever”, which will be presented in a double exhibition which is at the same time a retrospective and a thematic exhibition. Tom Wesselmann is immersed in the intellectual and aesthetic climate of the “Pop” era from which his work emerged, and which continues to frame him today.
Born in 1931, Tom Wesselmann began painting in the late 50s
Although he admired the visual impact of American abstract painters, he embraced the iconographic vocabulary of his time, incorporating advertisements, billboards, images, and objects into his work. He consciously pursued the classical genres of painting (still life, nude, landscape) while broadening the horizons of his art, both in terms of subject matter and technique. Halfway between painting and sculpture, his works also incorporate multimedia elements (light, movement, sound, video). As for his enormous and spectacular Standing Still Lifes, at the crossroads between painting and installation, they introduce a previously unseen format.
With works ranging from Wesselmann's early collages of 1959 to his large-scale relief still lifes, his landscapes – which lie on the fringes of abstraction – and his Sunset Nudes of 2004, the exhibition will span all four the plans of the Foundation building.
The exhibition, which will be chronologically linked to Wesselmann's works and themes, will use the artist's work as a starting point to develop a more general presentation of Pop Art. His Great American Nudes will be in dialogue with the American icons of his contemporaries (Evelyne Axell, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Marjorie Strider, Andy Warhol). The Dadaist roots of Pop Art (Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters) will be the precursors of his great collages. His representations of consumer goods prefigure the representations of commodities in the age of globalization by Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei. Finally, his nudes and intimate domestic scenes will be mirrored by new works by a new generation, some of which (Derrick Adams, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Mickalene Thomas) were created specifically for the exhibition.
