I’m a Believer
Pop Art and contemporary art from the Lenbachhaus and the Kico Foundation
In Pop Art, the ordinary, the entertaining, and irony conquered high culture. Here was art that was hip to the contemporary moment. Pop Art was the creative expression to match the euphoria of the postwar boom and the prosperous capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s. But it was always also a critical embrace of social and political conditions against which resistance had proven futile. Andy Warhol, for example, harnessed the principles of capitalism—advertising, political agitation, the superficiality of television—to generate ironic distance, producing pictures that have lost none of their popularity.
The exhibition I’m a Believer. Pop Art and contemporary art from the Lenbachhaus and the KiCo Foundation opens with classical positions: Andy Warhol, Thomas Bayrle, Ulrike Ottinger, and Hannsjörg Voth. The display then wends its way past Sigmar Polke’s German Pop and Stephen Shore’s photographs of North America’s suburbs to contemporary champions of the popular in visual art such as Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Judith Hopf, Daniel Man, and Pietro Sanguineti.
