Pop and Prosperity: 1960s British Art from the Swindon Collection

About

This exhibition explores the art and culture of 1960s Britain through some of the most significant paintings and drawings from the Swindon Collection.

This exciting new exhibition explores the impact of popular culture and society on British art in the 1960s, and features work by Howard Hodgkin, Michael Craig-Martin and Mary Fedden. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to appreciate the diversity, confidence and ambition of British art during the 1960s, and the way it responded to a rapidly changing world.

Pop and Prosperity takes as its starting point one of the most significant works in Swindon’s Collection, Richard Hamilton’s Interior Study. This collage embodies the growing ‘pop’ sensibility in contemporary art at the time, which engaged with everyday life and Britain’s post-war prosperity.

The exhibition also explores the rise of abstract painting in 1960s British art, as artists sought to embrace new forms of expression. Paintings by Bernard Cohen, Terry Frost and William Gear will be on display.

Finally, the exhibition looks at the influence of sixties art on subsequent generations of artists, from 1980s abstraction to the YBAs.