Curated by Marco Livingstone
Serpentine Gallery, London
Excerpt:
“The Title of the Serpentine exhibition running concurrently with the Royal Academy Pop Art Show, Objects for the Ideal Home, refers to Richard Hamilton’s early Pop piece, Just what is it that makes today’s’ homes so different, so appealing? Visually, this provides a summary of Pop art’s fascination with consumerism, advertising and mass-production, sex and banality. The Serpentine Show aimed to explore the continuing influence of the Pop movement on contemporary artists today and the similar concern with works based on the familiar and the domestic which are transformed into icons of everyday living. The metaphor of the department store was chosen to define the Serpentine’s spaces each room being given a title that alludes to the objects for sale: Fixtures and Fittings; Home Improvements; Originals and Replicas; Objets d’Art; Sign Systems. Brought together were 30 works by American and European artists of great stylistic diversity ranging from the modifications of fabricated objects by Rosemarie Trockel and Bertrand Lavier, the pristine sculpture of Julian Opie with their machine-like finish to the hilarity of Jeff Koons’ Winter Bears.”
This essay reprints, ‘Fixtures and Fittings’ from the Serpentine Catalogue featuring artists: Richard Artswager, Robert Gober, Cecile Johnson Soliz, Michael Craig-Martin, Grenville Davey, Allan McCollum, Cady Noland, Julian Opie and Ed Allington.