jueves, 20 de octubre de 2011

Pop Art & Opt Art

by Urquiza and Peña
Pop Art
The term Pop Art originated in the middle 1950`s in Britain ,and in the late 1950`s in The United States. It’s an international movement in painting, sculpture and printmaking.
It was the first pos-war art movement to embrace mass media, photography, imagery,popular culture ,consumer products, and photos of media stars.
Artists of this movement were looking for a more playful and ironic strategy.
Unlike abstract expressionism, pop art incorporated a wide range of media, imagery and subject matter that up to this moment it was excluded.
Pop artists cared a little about creating unique art object; they preferred to borrow their subject matter and techniques from mass media, photographs, icons and style into visual artefacts.
There are lots of artist such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Roy Kingenstein, Richard Hamilton. And the most important was Andrew Warhola (1928-1987) known as Andy Warhol. He was an American painter, print maker, and a film maker, record producer, author. He was a leading figure in this visual art movement known as Pop ART.
He applied the technique called "silkscreen”. Silkscreen is a technique that uses " woven mesh " to support an ink blocking stencil, the attach stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable material which can be presented through the mesh as a sharp -edged image onto a substrate. A roller is moved across the screen stencil ,forcing or pumping ink past of the woven mesh in the open areas. Through this technique we can transfer the same image.
Andy Warhol started doing silkscreens in 1962.One of his well-known painting using this technique is the one called " Marilyn Monroe”, it contains fifty images of the actress, which are all based on a single publicity photograph from the actress film " Niagara" (1953), twenty-five pictures on the left side are brightly colored while twenty five on the right side are black and white and also blurred or faded. The juxtaposition of the cold images with those in black and white is thought to symbolize to Monroe`s life and mortality.


Op art.
Op art or Optical art derives from the constructivist practices of the Bauhaus. When the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933, many of its artists went to United States where the movement appeared between 1950 and 1960.
Op art is a branch of geometric abstraction movement and includes paintings related with surface kinetics. It is a movement which exploits the fallibility of the eye through the use of optical illusion. The viewer gets the impression of movement by flashing and vibration or alternatively swelling and warping. Another characteristic of op art is the illusion of depth, relief, and motion through the elements such as colours, lines and shapes. Op art becomes popular and images were used in a number of commercial contexts as fashion.
There are important artists such as Bridget Riley, Jesus Sotto, and the most important was Victor Vasarely, who is considered the “father of op art”. He was born in Hungary and produced art and sculpture focused on optical illusion and geometric works, including zebra shapes.



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