Pop matters

 “Oslo in the summer time”, a bubbly song by an artful band from Athens Georgia cross- borderly called Of Montreal, freshly describes the avant-calm of the city. 

In a pre-summer morning of late May, the easy breathable air sets it self for the perfect anonymous walk into the walls of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, where I could determine how right a friend is every time he says “better little of what is good”. 

This is the realm of what a true, elegant and prosperous enclave can offer to the disperse art-hungry public that visits the institution’s building complex, this time through a show called “Surrounding Bacon & Warhol”, two pillars of 20^th century art, paralleled by their own separate and dissimilar, speaking in a redundantly modern way, visionary visions and creations.

Adventurous as it can seem to be, the compilation of works dissolves it self into a Pastel of Expressionist and Pop pieces, an audacious visual compendious of images, textures and canvas by a group of artists, carefully and daringly selected by the hermeneutic parallelism between their works and the exhibited pieces by violently visceral Francis and reproductive Andy.

After trespassing the entrance and looking around, the first glance astonishes the most indifferent and impermeable critic: late Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait with Skeleton Arm and Madonna (after Edward Munch) (1984). A dark painting that fusions a sober, rather prompt Munch, accompanied by a “darkholian” reproduction of Edward’s Madonna, armless and obscured by an alien faced figure which seems about to explode and scream, here’s one clever and crucial curatorial node: Warhol’s expressionism via Munch. 

As the exhibition continues, and the public, only me, crashes into the textures of Anselm Kiefer’s Ladder to the Sky (1991) an instinctive and tenuous painting that gives way to a big hall which shelters the former Joseph Beuys student’s Zweistormland / The High Priestess, a book-shelved, abandoned library shaped sculpture, an ode to the post-war German art which Kiefer explicitly presents and happens to be magnanimously deployed before a rounded armed concrete wall that stands behind it, an exponential succession of sepia and grey sculptured tones.

Leaving that pleasant war-tiredness rather dark scenery, a new vista of up coloured fresher panorama welcomes  in the following room: a group of school girls attentively listening to their art teacher, a middle aged woman who looked an sounded like an art teacher, while explaining the contents of the show to students and commenting it to the sympathetic and good looking girls working as museum assistants. 

Within this context, and pleased by the scents of shampoo that Norway’s clean air lets flow in a room with more that ten washed hairs can leave on a sensitive nose, the presence of Gerhard Richter’s Frau Niepenberg (1965) stands in franc blurry consonance with Warhol’s Big Electric Chair exhibited in the next room: a second and pertinent curatorial node.

At this point, the show becomes an intended statement starting to get rounded: In one hand, the English Pop apparition by David Hockney’s Colgated tooth paste Oil-Canvas Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10 pm) (1962), dialoguing with Warhol´s Jim Dime’s Fixing the Lights and Objects of My Vanity (1972); both Pop-Art emergence contemporaries patronized by fabulously conceived Tarzan, Jane, Boy and Cheetah (1966-1975) Peter Blake’s only but intelligently chosen work for the show. 

In a centred communicated room, at this time with the company of an Italian couple, two arty looking middle aged Norwegian men, and with the sound of naughty giggles of the dissipated school girl trip disbanded all around the museum, Warhol’s master pieces: Funky Era Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), Mid-Cold War conceived Hammer and Sickle (1976), and pre-mortem Rorschach (1984) and intense eyed Self Portrait (Flight Wig) (1976), perfect exhibition wrap ups, which round up the Pop Genius supported side of the show, while leaving, on the other hand, (Bacon’s Hand)  a mixture of tropical (Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield); darky norwegian (Olav Christopher Jensen, Björn Sigurd Tufta) and Martin Kipperberger’s German expressionism, a bracketed flavour of an obvious surrounding maxima:  Pop matters.