Reflections of Pop
Eduardo Arroyo / Equipo Crónica / Equipo Realidad / Luis Gordillo
Reflections of Pop surveys the reception of the international pop movement in Spain during the 1960s and 1970s through four of the individual artists and teams whose work illustrates the influence of this trend most clearly and continuously: Luis Gordillo, Eduardo Arroyo, Equipo Crónica and Equipo Realidad.
Pop art, based on images taken from popular culture – after which it is named – and the consumer society, is a unique and heterodox international figurative trend that emerged in the mid-1950s. In Spain, whose art scene was dominated by the abstraction of art informel, the pop movement made its appearance in the early 1960s, imbued withsharp criticism of the social, political and cultural environment of the final decades of the Franco regime. Borrowing and reinterpreting images from the press, advertisements, comic strips, films, television and art history, working in series, and the use of spot inks and a reduced palette of loud colours were its main formal characteristics, though Spanish artists tinged this reused popular iconography with social and political overtones.
However, it was not a collective movement; rather, a small number of Spanish artists espoused the American and European pop language of Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, Erró, Adami, Hockney, Rotella and others during specific periods of their output, with a variety of interests and approaches. To illustrate this scene, the selection of paintings shown here has been limited to the four abovementioned artists and teams – who are very different from each other despite their shared basis – and to the period from the late 1960s to the early 1970s when these ‘reflections of pop’ reached a peak.
Cover:
Equipo Realidad, Queen for a Day II, 1969 (detail). Courtesy Galería Punto
Luis Gordillo, Head with Stripes, 1964(detail). Private collection
Eduardo Arroyo, Retrato–Peintre (Portrait–Painter), 1975 (detail). ‘la Caixa’ Collection of Contemporary Art
Equipo Crónica, The Intruder, 1969 (detail). Diputación Provincial de Valencia
© Eduardo Arroyo, A+V Agencia de Creadores Visuales, 2016
© Equipo Crónica (Manolo Valdés), Equipo Realidad, Luis Gordillo, VEGAP, Málaga, 2016