Post Pop: East Meets West, Saatchi Gallery

Popular Pop Art
There have been countless Pop Art exhibitions dedicated to classic Pop Art artists – Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Jeff Koons, you know the drill. These big-name American artists have become part and parcel with the Pop Art movement. Alongside this, Pop art today in the capital has commonly become associated with the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective (Tate Modern) which led to that popular pop art makeup tutorial on how to achieve the red dots of Lichtenstein’s cartoon figures – a 2013 fancy dress favourite. So when was it that you last thought of Pop from a more penetrating global perspective?

Saatchi Gallery, Tsukanov
As the Tate Modern London gears up for its own take on international Pop Art in The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern in 2015), the Saatchi Gallery (London) in partnership with the Tsukanov Family Foundation (TFF) presents the first comprehensive survey of why Pop Art has had an enduring legacy all over the world - even in regions with opposing political ideologies. Led by Igor Tsukanov (art collector of idiosyncratic tendencies), the Tsukanov Family Foundation with its Tsukanov art collection lends a large portion of post-war Russian art to the exhibition.

Saatchi Gallery, Pop Art
Post Pop: East Meets West at Saatchi Gallery, winter 2014, features 256 works by 112 artists from America, China, the Former Soviet Union and the UK that question the development of artistic production in these four distinct regions since the advent of Pop. The Saatchi pop art exhibition layout is through the framework of six themes: Habitat; Advertising & Consumerism; Celebrity & Mass Media; Art History; Religion & Ideology and Sex & the Body.

Saatchi Post Pop: East Meets West, exhibition 
The show’s array of famous international curators – Andrey Erofeev, Marco Livingstone and Tsong-Zung Chang have combined their expertise to demonstrate the surprising cross-references between the different nations surveyed. The political dynamism of Pop could not be captured more vividly than with Erofeev’s involvement in the exhibition. Through an exhibition of provocative and forbidden art, Andrey Erofeev was dismissed from his post as curator (Tretyakov Gallery) in the first decade of the 21^st century for defaming Russia. Furthermore, in the content of the exhibition Ai Weiwei’s satirical commentary on the visual icons of Socialist Realism in China shares space with the wry humour of work by Jeff Koons, and the digital experiments of Julian Opie.

Eastern pop art
Thanks to works such as Andy Warhol’s screen prints and Brillo boxes, Pop Art is regarded one of the most important art movements of the 20^th century. However, this show at the Saatchi Art Gallery, London goes beyond the conventional examples we all know to include their eastern counterparts. There are works from the Soviet Union "Sots Art" movement (pioneer of Sots Art, Alexander Kosolapov is well worth a visit in this exhibition) and works from the "Political-Pop" and "Cynical Realism" which has flourished in China since the 1990s.

Culture Whisper thinks...
Despite their different geographical locations, all the artists featured play with the signature mass-produced objects and texts of popular culture in the 20^th century. Imagery from commercial advertising, propaganda posters and pictures of the famous suggest that, in fact, the true extent of Pop’s global influence is only just revealing itself. We advise a re-evaluation of Pop-ular conceptions through visiting this must-see exhibition in London 2014/2015.