NEW YORK, NY.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents a focused exhibitions selected from the museum's permanent collection, exploring Pop art. The explosion of Pop art in America in the early 1960s signaled the return to representational images following the Abstract Expressionists of the preceding decades, who favored large gestural canvases and expressive colors. Other artists at this time investigated the aesthetic potential of paintings and sculpture dominated by a single color or limited to a narrow spectrum of tones.

Pop Objects and Icons from the Guggenheim Collection is on view on Annex Level 5 from through January 11, 2012, with an additional gallery on Annex Level 7 on view through February 8, 2012.

Pop Objects and Icons from the Guggenheim Collection
Pioneered in England in the late 1950s, the Pop art movement took hold in America after support from critics, including British critic Lawrence Alloway, who coined the term "Pop art" in 1958 and organized the seminal 1963 Guggenheim exhibition Six Painters and the Object. Encouraged by the economic vitality and consumerist culture of post–World War II America, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol explored the image world of popular culture—from which the movement’s name derives—and took inspiration from advertisements, pulp magazines, billboards, movies, television, and comic strips. The cool detachment and harsh, impersonal look of Pop art signaled a direct assault on the hallowed traditions of "high art" and the personal gesture, so strongly championed by the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists. The images, presented with––and sometimes transformed by––humor, wit, and irony, may be read as both an unabashed celebration and a scathing critique of popular culture.