Artists, being curious people, like to think about the future. Sometimes, as with the legendary 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, they can build a whole movement out of it. Mid 20th-century Pop art types were at it more than most, recycling mass-production images into collages that proclaimed the streamlined, plastic future that many thought was hurtling towards them. It might be instructive therefore to pop along to The Future Was Then at the Cartoon Museum,
In 1981, a young Parisian director kickstarted a style of French cinema as synonymous with the decade to come as the Nouvelle Vague was with the 1960s, or poetic realism with the 1930s. The cinema du look was a term coined by critic Raphaël Bassan to describe the work of three young filmmakers - Léos Carax, Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix - overwhelmingly concerned with matters of style.
Ice Breaker is Erik Parker's second solo exhibition at VETA by Fer Francés, holding a new body of work created specifically for this occasion. In this new project, the artist expands his distinctive visual language-rooted in Pop Art, the underground movement, and the American psychedelic subculture-into a series that is at once hallucinatory and precise. His still lifes introduce new spatial dynamics: bricks and their shadows defy logical light sources, producing a disorienting effect that steers the viewer into a heightened, almost psychedelic state.
Rauschenberg's radial use of media imagery and commercial printing techniques led critics to associate him with Pop artists such as Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Rauschenberg was also enamored with contemporary culture.
