Neo-pop

also: New Pop

movement 1980s-present United States United Kingdom

Neo-pop resurfaced in the 1980s and 1990s as Pop Art's exuberant heir, reviving the older movement's fascination with consumer culture, mass media, and kitsch while drawing on a wider range of sources and techniques. The Japanese critic Noi Sawaragi coined the term in 1992. In the United States Jeff Koons inflated balloon animals and polished porcelain figurines to billboard scale, treating taste itself as the subject; in Britain Damien Hirst's spot paintings and vitrines turned serial repetition into a brand-like spectacle, and Keith Haring's radiant babies and barking dogs moved easily between gallery and street. In Japan Takashi Murakami recycled anime and manga culture into the flat, decorative language he would call Superflat. Throughout runs a bright, glossy surface that refuses the old boundary between high art and advertising.

Surealist Pop public art Florentin Tel Aviv
Surealist Pop public art Florentin Tel AvivCC BY-SA 4.0 (credit: LeRenartQuiPense) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Bright, saturated color and glossy, high-finish surfaces
  • Celebrity, cartoon, mascot, and trademark imagery quoted directly
  • Kitsch embraced deliberately: balloon animals, porcelain figurines, patterned cheer
  • Everyday commercial formats - ads, packaging, products - enlarged into art
  • Repetition and pattern (polka dots, flowers, hearts) as decorative skin
  • Blurring of gallery art and merchandising

Key figures

  • Jeff Koons (b. 1955) — Turned kitsch objects into monumental, mirror-polished sculpture
  • Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) — Fused anime and manga culture with fine art and founded the Superflat style
  • Damien Hirst (b. 1965) — Spot paintings and vitrines made serial spectacle his signature
  • Keith Haring (1958-1990) — Cartoon-line imagery that traveled between street, print, and gallery

Example works

Sources

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