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Pop art paintings

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Pop art: the art of mass culture

The classical artistic tradition has always opposed everyday life and vulgarity. In this paradigm, art was perceived as a spiritual activity that connects a person to truth and beauty. Everything changed in the 20th century. The two world wars demonstrated the internal failure of traditional culture's claims to truth and pushed artists to revise their views on art. The impetus for the birth of a new direction was a protest against abstract expressionism. Artists wanted to create something closer and more understandable to people. In the middle of the last century, objects of mass culture, actively involved in advertising, cinema and various entertainment events, came into focus. The techniques and decisions of the new direction were so far removed from traditional ideas about creative activity that some critics simply refused to recognize pop art as art. Nevertheless, the innovative trend took its place in the history of avant-garde painting and became the personification of an entire era.

Stylist features of pop art

Pop art focuses on objects of mass culture. It can be emblems of famous companies, branded products, popular actors, singers or any mass-produced items that fill our everyday life. As for color solutions, here artists usually use warm tones with bright, acidic colors. Sometimes paintings in this style are more like an advertising poster than a work of art. The colored background usually does not contain clues that reveal the content of the plot, and is most often selected during visual experiments. Popular slogans, phrases or simple mottos are sometimes present on the canvas. Works in the style of pop art are often created by means of techniques that are relatively simple in technical terms: photo printing, projection, copying, collage. Such works fit well into various styles of modern interior. They are repeaters of popular images and meanings of mass culture. When choosing a picture in the style of pop art, attention is often paid to the color scheme, rather than the plot of the canvas itself. On the other hand, today you can find many works whose plots cannot be called simple and trivial.

Pop art in Ukrainian painting

Your "invasion" pop art began to enter Ukrainian art during the times of the USSR together with banned literature from the "bourgeois West". Ukrainians could see the works of artists with their own eyes on the pages of books criticizing "capitalist art." Domestic artists did not assimilate pop art in the form it existed in the USA or Europe: at that time, the problems of consumer society and mass culture were practically unknown to Ukrainian society. However, representatives of the "new wave" actively used the bright, expressive language of the new direction of Western painting. After the declaration of Independence, Ukrainian artists were able to become more familiar with the ideological concepts of pop art, which had a positive effect on the popularity of the direction. Today, domestic masters use his technique in their work, combining them with other styles. This is due to the fact that, in general, the problem of the mass person and the standardization of consciousness is not so acutely articulated in our culture. Ukrainian pop art enters into a dialogue with our national mentality, experiments with its motives and rethinks the view of the surrounding world.