"I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and the soup can
was it," Andy Warhol, in Mike Wrenn, Andy Warhol in His Own Words. London:
Omnibus Press, 1991, p. 20.
The presentation of the object, so vital to such aspects of consumer culture as
packaging and advertising, was of great interest to artists in the postwar
period, particularly during the 1950s and ’60s. The Pop artists abandoned many
of the established artistic conventions of the past, replacing them with
mechanically reproduced, serially repeated, and prefabricated images, and chose
as their subject the mythic representation of the consumer-tailored object. In
the present exhibition, works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha
exploring the transformation of the commonplace object—a sneaker, a can of
soup, a tin of Spam—into a commercially desirable commodity indicate the
degree to which the still life is an evolving system of representation, closely
related to changes in culture and society.
