“Soft Shuttlecock” (1995) by Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen from “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now.”Credit...David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
The exhibition takes particular pleasure in reclaiming a piece of the Guggenheim’s own history. In 1963, British curator and critic Lawrence Alloway organized “Six Painters and the Object,” the first museum presentation of Pop art in New York. The exhibition brought together artists including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, helping establish the Guggenheim as an early institutional supporter of a movement that was then still regarded with suspicion by parts of the art establishment.
That history gives the current exhibition its underlying logic. Rather than presenting Pop as a neatly sealed chapter of the 1960s, curator Lauren Hinkson places approximately three decades of historical Pop alongside work by contemporary artists who have inherited—or challenged—its visual vocabulary. Twenty-nine artists are represented, including John Chamberlain, Chryssa, Richard Hamilton, Yayoi Kusama, Marta Minujín, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Lucas Samaras, Lichtenstein and Warhol, alongside a younger generation that includes Maurizio Cattelan, Alex Da Corte, Lauren Halsey, Lucia Hierro, Martine Gutierrez, Wendy Red Star and Sheida Soleimani.
The historical works remain the show’s strongest cards. Warhol’s Orange Disaster #5 (1963), with its repetition of a newspaper image of death, demonstrates how an apparently cool Pop surface can conceal an extraordinary psychological charge. Richard Hamilton’s The Solomon R. Guggenheim (Spectrum) (1965–66) turns the museum itself into a shimmering object of consumption, while Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Soft Shuttlecock (1995) transforms an ordinary piece of sporting equipment into something wonderfully absurd. The latter is particularly effective in the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda, where its inflated scale and softness seem to mock the building’s monumental seriousness.
The contemporary works complicate the picture. For artists working after the age of mass television, advertising and print culture, the popular image has migrated to social media, online commerce and an increasingly fragmented visual landscape. Lauren Halsey, Farah Al Qasimi, Cara Romero and others use Pop’s strategies while addressing questions of identity, race, gender, politics and representation that were largely absent from the movement’s original canon.
Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM – DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE (2019) provides perhaps the exhibition’s most spectacular bridge between eras. Kusama’s inclusion also challenges the conventional, male-dominated narrative of Pop. Her work existed alongside the movement but never fit comfortably within its categories, making her presence here feel less like an addition than a correction.
At the opposite extreme is Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), the infamous banana duct-taped to a wall. It is both a punchline and a perfect contemporary Pop object: cheap, perishable, instantly recognizable and transformed into an expensive work of art largely through context and publicity.
“Guggenheim Pop” ultimately suggests that Pop’s great innovation was not an aesthetic but a method: look at what everyone else is looking at, then make us look again. Sixty years later, the objects have changed, but the question remains the same—where does ordinary life end and art begin? The Guggenheim’s answer is that, increasingly, there may be no boundary at all.
