POP
Pop Art emerged in America around 1960 and became a universal and interdisciplinary cultural phenomenon. During this time, a generation of artists emerged, including Andy Warhol, who formed American Pop Art as a figurative counter-movement to Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. The aim of Pop Art was to elevate what was suitable for the masses to the status of art. The object was not the object itself, but its mass-reproduced image. Andy Warhol often subjected these images to technical reproduction processes (screen printing), which contributed to a further stylisation. He often emphasised the impersonal machine-like quality by reproducing a motif in a multitude of versions and by processing different motifs in the same way.
British Pop Art developed as a parallel movement to American Pop Art; David Hockney is one of its most important representatives. In 1964, he moved to Los Angeles, where his swimming pool paintings were his artistic breakthrough. He also devoted himself to illustrating literature. In addition to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, he published a cycle of etchings based on poems by Konstantinos Kavafis (1863-1933) in 1967. In his verses, Kavafis describes his own homosexual fantasies and dreams after having to hide his sexual orientation for a long time.
American and British Pop Art influenced the German artist Uwe Lausen as well as the photographic works of his wife Heide Stolz. Staging, provocation, breaking taboos, drugs, violence – the works of the artist couple had no equivalent in the 1960s. They were created at a time characterised by considerable changes and upheavals and in which a new generation broke with traditional conventions. Stolz’s photographs and Lausen’s canvases tell of the role of the individual in the changing social context of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s, but also of close artistic exchange and influence.
