In 1963, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented Six Painters and the Object, the first museum exhibition on Pop Art in the famous city. The exhibition, curated by British curator and art critic Lawrence Alloway, was groundbreaking for the art movement and its reception in the U.S.; today it is considered one of the most famous movements of all time. The same museum is now revisiting this lesser-known chapter of Pop Art: Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now explores the history of the Guggenheim Museum in New York in relation to Pop Art and the movement’s enduring influence on today’s artists. It shows how Pop Art makes the familiar seem strange, elevates the commercial to the sacred, and transforms the banal into the spectacular; it redefines what art can be. The exhibition opens in two phases: Starting June 5, works from the 1960s and 1970s will be on display, alongside one of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. These works will be supplemented with contemporary pieces starting June 26, after which the exhibition will run through January 10, 2027.
Visitors can expect to see iconic works from the Guggenheim Museum’s collection by more than 20 renowned artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, John Chamberlain, Chryssa, Alex Da Corte, Jim Dine, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Yee I-Lann, Roy Lichtenstein, Lucas Samaras, and Andy Warhol. For the first time in 25 years, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s work Soft Shuttlecock (1995)—one of their more than 25 large-scale projects—is on view again in New York. The work was designed specifically for an Oldenburg retrospective in 1995 with the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum in mind. Through it, the artists not only highlight the role of a museum as an educational cultural mediator but also as a place of entertainment.
