Pim Pam Pop

Opera Gallery Madrid is pleased to present Pim Pam Pop, an exhibition dedicated to Pop Art, bringing together a carefully curated selection of artworks and masterpieces by some of the most internationally renowned representatives of this movement. Spanning key figures from the United States, Europe, and Spain, the exhibition offers a dynamic panorama of Pop Art as both a visual language and a critical tool.

International Icons and Spanish Voices in Conversation

The exhibition features major international icons of Pop Art, including Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami, and Andy Warhol, presented alongside leading Spanish artists such as Pedro Almodóvar, Eduardo Arroyo, Rafael Canogar, Equipo Crónica, Juan Genovés, Luis Gordillo, Cristóbal Hara, Isabel Oliver, Antonio Saura, and Manolo Valdés. Together, these artists establish a dialogue between global Pop aesthetics and the specific cultural, political, and social realities that shaped Spanish Pop Art.

Pim‑Pam‑Pop: An Iconic Work as Manifesto

The exhibition takes its title from Pim-Pam-Pop (1971) by Equipo Crónica, a seminal work from their Policía y Culturaseries. In this iconic painting, police officers carry pictorial figures instead of weapons as they traverse a field of flowers inspired by Warhol, set against an industrial background evocative of Fernand Léger and Roy Lichtenstein. Both humorous and unsettling, the work encapsulates the visual strategies and critical stance of Spanish Pop Art, blending irony, quotation, and political commentary.

The Birth and Global Reach of Pop Art

Like many artistic movements of the second half of the twentieth century, Pop Art first emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, achieving immediate visibility through its confrontational and iconoclastic stance toward the dominant aesthetic debates of the time. Rejecting the transcendent and spiritual ambitions of Abstract Expressionism—which had established New York as the centre of the international avant-garde—artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns introduced a radically different approach. Johns’ paintings of flags, targets, numbers, and letters, and Rauschenberg’s combines incorporating found objects and mechanical printing techniques, challenged notions of artistic authenticity and reclaimed the analytical legacy of Marcel Duchamp.

In 1958, critic Lawrence Alloway first used the term “Pop Art” to describe this emerging sensibility, linking contemporary art to the imagery of mass media. A key moment in the movement’s consolidation came in 1962 with The New Realistsexhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, which brought together American artists such as Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann alongside a broad group of European artists. Borrowing its title from the French Nouveaux Réalistes, the exhibition underscored the fundamentally international character of Pop Art, rooted in urban life, consumer culture, and the material world.

Although Pop Art’s initial prominence was relatively brief—soon followed in the 1960s and 1970s by movements such as Op Art, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual Art—its influence has endured powerfully to the present day. Both extraordinarily popular and deeply influential, Pop Art may be compared in its cultural reach only to Surrealism in the first half of the twentieth century. The continued relevance of its visual language, strategies, and critical attitudes is evident throughout Pim Pam Pop.

Everyday Images, New Figurations, and the Democratisation of Art

Across its many expressions, Pop Art developed new forms of figuration that deliberately moved away from abstraction, while re-engaging with traditional genres such as still life, landscape, and portraiture—without prioritising representational virtuosity. Like the abstract painters of the previous generation, Pop artists rejected the illusionistic depth of painting, affirming its flatness and aligning it with the visual languages of advertising, comics, magazines, and mass media. Irony became central to this approach: kitsch, vulgarity, and the banal were employed in a parodic and often provocative manner, challenging notions of good taste and decorum.

Pop Art did not arise from a manifesto, nor did it produce a unified style. Instead, it encompassed formally diverse practices united by a shared intent to provoke and to reflect critically on contemporary life. Its imagery was drawn from the everyday experiences of large cities and was closely connected to the youth protest movements of the era in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Milan, and Paris. Over time, critics such as Marco Livingstone have highlighted how the movement’s apparent fascination with banality gave way to more complex readings: the tragic undertones in Warhol’s treatment of fame and death, the classical restraint in Lichtenstein’s compositions, or the unexpected intimacy and humanity of Oldenburg’s monumental recreations of ordinary objects.

A defining ambition of Pop Art was the democratisation of art itself. By using recognisable, accessible, and familiar images, Pop artists rejected the romantic image of the artist as a heroic, isolated figure detached from reality. As Andy Warhol famously insisted, he worked with what was closest to him—everything that surrounded him. This embrace of everyday imagery, bold colour, and visual immediacy continues to resonate in contemporary practices, from American painters of the 1980s such as George Condo, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring, to Japanese artists influenced by comics and animation, including Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami, as well as figures from other disciplines, such as the filmmaker and artist Pedro Almodóvar.

Spanish Pop Art: Irony, Politics, and Subversion

Throughout the exhibition, Spanish Pop Art unfolds as a mosaic-like narrative in which political tension, mass culture, art history, and popular imagery are tightly interwoven. Humour operates both as a point of entry and as a weapon—seductive in its colour and visual impact, yet incisive in its critique. Beneath the hypnotic surfaces lies a deep internal turmoil shaped by censorship, repression, and resistance. This is evident in the works of artists such as Eduardo Arroyo, Rafael Canogar, Juan Genovés, and Luis Gordillo. Canogar, who began his career as an abstract informalist painter, ultimately abandoned abstraction, finding it a limited and potentially elitist language. Isabel Oliver, one of the few female artists working within the social and political context of late Francoism, delivers a clear critique of the domestication of women under the dictatorship.

A Living Legacy

By bringing together iconic figures such as Warhol and Lichtenstein with the irony, humour, and subversion of Spanish Pop Art, Pim Pam Pop creates a compelling connection between art, history, and social reality. The exhibition offers a hypnotic visual experience of colour and form, underpinned by a persistent sense of drama and subversion that continues to resonate today.