Power Up

The ladies of Pop Art play with art in the Bad Girl manner between Pin-Up and consumerism. These unconventional and powerful works are determined by female sexuality and lust, the post-war economic miracle and politics. Pop characterizes the humour and lightness of their attitude towards life. This book presents extraordinary women Pop artists. While it was mainly their male colleagues who have been celebrated up to the present, Power Up Female Pop Art now casts light for the first time on prominent women artists. In the tension field between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, figuration and abstraction, consumerism and capitalism criticism, the works by these artists certainly resemble those by their male colleagues in terms of material, subject matter and working method. But at the same time, a specific female methodology, approach or interest is established based on exemplary works. The artists document and subjectify the post-war boom years, reflect the superficiality of consumerism and meet mass taste as pioneering feminist positions in their pithiness, monumentality, the simple vocabulary of forms as well as the gaudy choice of colours, and nevertheless remain combative, critical and extraordinary. Artists include: Evelyne Axell, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Sister Corita Kent, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, Niki de Saint Phalle Exhibition Power up Women Pop Artists, Kunsthalle Wien, 5 November 2010 23 January 2011.