Icons: The Art of Appropriation

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Appropriation — borrowing familiar images from various sources — has taken many forms over the past six decades. In the 1960s Andy Warhol famously began using pictures from consumer culture including photographs of Marilyn Monroe and advertisements for Campbell’s soup. In the same vein Roy Lichtenstein drew from preexisting comics and Richard Prince appropriated photographs of cowboys from Marlboro cigarette ads.

Appropriation took on new significance when artists began borrowing recognizable images not only from mass culture as a whole, but from the art world itself. Icons: The Art of Appropriation celebrates precisely this practice: the deliberate recreation of another artist’s work, offering a fresh perspective on the notions of art, originality and authorship. From Richard Pettibone’s miniature versions of Warhol’s already well-known paintings to Mike Bidlo’s renditions of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings to The Bruce High Quality Foundation’s transformations of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist women, this exhibition will explore the ways in which the appropriation of iconic works of art forces the viewer to reassess many of art history’s radical insights and crowning achievements.