Pop Art & Pottery

Wolverhampton Arts and Culture, UK

Pop Art & Pottery present a kaleidoscope of Pop ceramics by key artists from around the world. 

From special edition dinner plates to tea services, vases to mugs the exhibition, Pop Art & Pottery, features items from private collections that have not been displayed before in public. 

Curated by independent curator Nick Duxbury and using Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s Pop art collection as an anchoring point, the exhibition brings the conversations around Pop art into the twenty-first century. It includes works by contemporary ceramic artists who use everyday objects as their canvas for pop culture references and the kind of iconography that would be familiar to the originators of Pop art. 

Driven by the curator David Rodgers, the Art Gallery first began collecting Pop art in the late 1960s when it was still relatively new and controversial. At first, the growing collection attracted negative media attention and provocative headlines such as ‘Tories fuming over Pop Art’. Rodgers himself was labelled ‘a rebel leader of the arts’. Today, Pop art is considered one of Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s most culturally significant and internationally renowned collections. Visitors come from far and wide to view it and our Pop works go out on loan to exhibitions all around the world.

Pop art and ceramics have a strong but overlooked history. Since Pop emerged as an art movement in the mid-1950s, many leading Pop artists have produced designs for some of the biggest ceramics manufacturers in the world. Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake and Patrick Caulfield designed items for Wedgwood, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol for Rosenthal, Keith Haring for Villeroy & Boch, Sister Corita Kent for Hackett American Collectors. 

Wolverhampton Art Gallery houses the largest collection of Pop art outside of London and featuring along with Pop Art & Pottery a number of the city’s Pop art collection are on display for visitors to see.

https://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/whats-on/pop-art-and-pottery/