GROUP SHOW WITH EVELYNE AXELL
POP FOREVER TOM WESSELMANN &…
FOUNDATION LOUIS VUITTON, PARIS, FRANCE
17 OCTOBER 2024 – 24 FEBRUARY 2O25
From 17 October 2024 to 24 February 2025, Fondation Louis Vuitton present “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…”, an exhibition dedicated to Pop Art, one of the major artistic movements of the 1960s, whose influence continues to be felt across all continents and amongst all generations.
The exhibition is centered around Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) – one of the leading figures of the movement — through a selection of 150 paintings and works in various materials. The exhibition also features 70 works by 35 artists of different generations and nationalities who share a common sensibility for “Pop” – from its Dadaist roots to its contemporary manifestations, and from the 1920s to the present day.
Evelyne Axell, ICE CREAM, 1964
Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 cm, Private Collection Belgium
Artist credit: © Adagp, Paris, 2024 Photo credit: © Paul Louis
In the late 1950s, Pop Art surged on both sides of the Atlantic, in North America and Europe. Comic strips, advertising, cinema, celebrities, food processors, and tabloids all became painting subjects. When they were not paintings in themselves, they were photographic images glued or mechanically reproduced onto the canvas. Pop Art celebrates, with a degree of ambiguity, the marriage of art and popular culture, of museums and galleries and the cultural industry. With no manifesto and no boundaries, Pop Art denominates an aesthetic that extends far beyond the artistic realm and prevails to this day. It is difficult to say when Pop Art began, and certainly impossible to close the chapter on it.
The exhibition, which is chronologically linked to Wesselmann’s works and themes, uses the artist’s work as a starting point to develop a more general presentation of Pop Art. His Great American Nudes will be in dialogue with the American icons of his contemporaries (Evelyne Axell, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Marjorie Strider, Andy Warhol). The Dadaist roots of Pop Art (Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters) will be the precursors to his large collages. As for his depictions of consumer goods, they prefigure the representations of merchandise in the age of globalization by Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei. Finally, his nudes and intimate domestic scenes are mirrored by new works from a new generation, some of which (Derrick Adams, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Mickalene Thomas) are created specifically for the exhibition.