andywarhol

After visiting the Warhol this week, I remembered how much I like Pop Art. Pop art is based on our pop culture and the mass media. It’s complete opposite of traditional fine art. It uses bold and bright colors and recognizable imagery. Thanks to Andy Warhol, Pop art found its way into package design. We are all familiar with his Campbell’s Soup cans/boxes and Brillo boxes. Warhol once said that, “Pop art is about liking things,” and it’s because of his liking of Campbell’s Soup that he made his iconic works. He felt that, “it [Campbell’s Soup] was the quintessential American product: he marveled that the soup always tasted the same, like Coca-Cola, whether consumed by prince or pauper.”

Fast forward 56 years to this century, you can still find Pop art in packaging and advertising. Take this packaging concept for the Goode Coffee Company. It was designed by Allan Revah who wanted to show the energizing qualities of coffee and caffeine with strong, expressive visuals. The coffee cups and bags have abstract geometric patterns and shapes on them. They’re enhanced by the loud, bright colors, too. They clearly have a Pop art style to them. I personally think they’re reminiscent comic book works of Roy Lichtenstein. Even though the packaging differs from one another, they still manage to belong to one company’s product.

Sources:

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/artsy-coffee-cups

http://www.warhol.org/education/resourceslessons/Campbell’s-Soup–Ode-to-Food/

https://www.behance.net/arevah

I had the best time today at The Andy Warhol Museum! Get this! 7 floors of Andy Warhol’s and Ai Weiwei’s works, side by side. Amazing! Whereas, the Ai Weiwei exhibit at Carnegie Museum of Art was just his Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, the Warhol featured almost all of Weiwei’s works. I got to see two of his works which I shared in the my previous blog post about Weiwei: Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) and Tea Brick (2006). However, the Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn wasn’t displayed as photographs. According to the description, Weiwei recreated his iconic work in legos, and in a pixelated form, to argue the distribution of images by digital technologies. It was really awesome to see Warhol’s and Weiwei’s works side by side. It allowed me to see how much of an influence Warhol was to Weiwei. Each floor “focus[ed] on the parallels, intersections, and points of differences between their practices.” I saw how one person represented the 20th century (Warhol), while the other represented this current century (Weiwei). I was surprised to see how their respective works on Mao were similar to one another. They both featured his face and his signature stance, except they were executed with different materials. Weiwei painted his Maos’ with oil on canvas, while Warhol used acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen fabric. At the end of my visit, I came to a conclusion. Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol both produced work on controversial subjects during controversial time periods. If you guys have the chance, I highly recommend seeing Weiwei’s exhibit at Carnegie first, and then see this second exhibit at the Warhol!

Check out my post on Ai Weiwei for a refresher!

Check out my trip!