To mark Fondation Louis Vuitton‘s 10-year anniversary, the two-pronged, museum-wide exhibition, Tom Wesselmann: Pop Forever, will be on view acting simultaneously as a retrospective of Tom Wesselmann (1931 – 2004), and a thematic show on Pop Art as a genre. Pop Forever puts the works of Wesselmann, a key figure of Pop Art, in direct conversation with artists spanning generations, combining typologies of motifs and subjects to offer a fascinating perspective on the genre’s past and exploring the question of what Pop Art can mean today, and in the future.
Tom Wesselmann: Pop Forever pulls together 150 works from Wesselmann from over 80 archives, and an additional 70 works from 35 artists. Chronologically linking works and themes, Pop Forever uses Wesselmann as a starting point to develop a more general presentation of Pop Art. His Great American Nudes will be in dialogue with the American icons of his contemporaries (Evelyne Axell, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Marjorie Strider, Andy Warhol). The Dadaist roots of Pop Art (Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters) will be the precursors to his large collages. Wesselmann’s depictions of consumer goods will prefigure the representations of merchandise in the age of globalization by Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei. Finally, his nudes and intimate domestic scenes will be mirrored by new works from a new generation, some of which (Derrick Adams, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Mickalene Thomas) have been created specifically for the exhibition.
