Post Pop – East Meets West

Visiting the Post Pop exhibition at the Saatchi gallery in London is a perfect start for the year of art shows. Pop-art has been trendy for the last couple of years, and now it has reached the global art scene.

Another major upcoming exhibition called The World Goes Pop will open at Tate Modern next fall. It will have a same focus than the Saatchi exhibition. So, it will be interesting to compare the two.

All in all the movement of Pop art has evolved into a wider context and criticism against not only western commercialisation of society and lifestyles, but towards more general public protest.

It is interesting to see how in building identity both Russian and Chinese artists use local references. The strongest work comes from former Soviet Union countries, which have traditionally darker sense of humour and sinister take on life.

In my opinion the exhibition would have been even more interesting focusing only on emerging countries, and not Western art.

However, I must agree that Paul McCarthy’s Spaghetti Man seemed perfectly in place in the gallery’s corridor.