Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Through Jan 19

All

2 / 10

Previous Next

The artists in this gallery looked underneath the slick surfaces of consumer culture and Pop Art to expose the strange, alienating effect of the American Dream. A common object appears enormous, like Alex Hay’s paper bag. The warmth of a movie theater gives way to a sinister showing in Roger Brown’s painting. A body, as in Martha Rosler’s collages, merges with household technologies. The works on display here can be understood in terms of their destabilizing effect on the viewer. They question the reciprocal relationship between consumption and identity: a relationship that was increasingly fraught in the consumerist boom of the post-World War II era. In 1966 curator Gene Swenson organized The Other Tradition, an exhibition in Philadelphia that included many of the artists in this gallery alongside historic Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. The works presented in The Other Tradition, Swenson proposed, “might be said to objectify experience, to turn feelings into things so thatwe can deal with them.”

Bright red poster with green, black, and orange shapes evoking a dragon-like human figure with 'Screamin J Hawkins' written above.

Seven women stand in a row wearing vintage swimsuits, smiling and facing forward against a plain background.

A surreal image shows a washing machine with a human body part replacing its front panel.

A person in a blue outfit leaps in a green orchard. Text at the bottom reads, "are you a Springmaid?"

Lee Lozano, No title, 1964

Jim Nutt, Running Wild, 1969–70

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

An Other Pop

2

Artists

On the Hour