Pop Art - The Colorful Rebellion of Everyday Life

In the early 1960s, the Pop Art movement emerged - the word pop is an abbreviation of the English expression "popular art", meaning art with great popularity among the public, as originally opposed to "academic art."). Its representatives tried to replace abstract art with a new type of realism, using in their compositions objects from everyday life, reproductions from magazines, illustrations, photographs, elevating to the level of artistic conception, combinations united by chance.

It had its beginnings in Great Britain, but reaching its peak in America towards the end of the 1970s, the Pop Art movement took images from other forms of popular art: advertising, comics, urban art, cinema. An ironic-contestant movement, Pop Art retained its protest connotation in many other fields, not only in art.

Pop art

The emergence of the Pop Art movement is largely linked to the work of two neo-Dadaist artists: Jasper Jones and Robert Rauschenberg. In the fifties, these artists introduced everyday objects into art, either directly or through their images. The most famous Pop Art personality, however, was Andy Warhol. He initiated the series “Coca-Cola Bottles” and “Cans”, representations of household objects, industrial products or advertising motifs. Later, he inserted fragments of comics into his paintings, with resistant or elastic structures and even reproduced, in some works, life-sized objects.

Andy Warhol

The first exhibitions of the American Pop Art movement provoked a negative reaction among the public. Over time, however, this direction began to be treated seriously, thanks to the exhibition dedicated to collage and assemblage, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Richard Hamilton

The Pop Art movement is one of the most colorful and “playful” artistic movements of the last century. Inspired by the imagery richness of consumer society, it quickly entered fields such as fashion or interior design, remaining a constant stylistic landmark to this day.
Playful and optimistic, even if slightly ironic, the Pop Art movement brought a touch of frivolity needed in a world still marked by the emergence from war. Nowadays, it constitutes a permanent oasis of color in the midst of minimalist “desertification”.
In conclusion, here is an easy project to create your own pop-art creation, and in a few simple steps.

Step 1.
You need:
- picture of a favorite animal (in our example), portrait of someone dear or anything else;
- Two A4 sheets of complementary colors (or any colors you prefer);
- Scissors;
- Glue;
- You will need a scanner and a printer;

First, cut out the desired image and then scan it and print it directly onto the first colored paper, adding (either from the computer or from the scanner) greater contrast to the image and of course the image must be scanned or converted to black and white.

Step 1

Step 2.
The second colored paper can also be printed with a very fine texture (as in the picture) or anything else. Then cut out the outline of the image from the first colored sheet and stick it on the second textured printed paper.

Step 2

Step 3.
Then frame as desired.

Step 3

The final result.

The final result