On May 17, The Garage in Amsterdam will open the new group show, Post Digital Pop, an all-star line up of artists whose works reflect their relationship with themselves and others through digital screens. The exhibition brings together a new generation of talents who share a vision of our digital-fueled reality through a more-less traditional artistic approach. The show is a curatorial collaboration with Juxtapoz contributing editor, Sasha Bogojev and The Garage's Mark Chalmers.
"Post Digital Pop" is a term that was originally coined by painter Oli Epp for his seminal 2017 degree show. Two years later, it feels like it's growing into a genre of its own, convening creatives that are directly responsive to technological novelties and social trends of the twenty-first century.
"I understand post-digital, not as 'after' digital, but as how we think of ourselves in the context of the digital age, or even directly through it — our relationship with ourselves and others through screens. So, if our lives are an economy of real and digital spaces, I use pop as a medium to move between them because of the way that advertising, etc. bleeds between the realms," Oli Epp writes.
In Post Digital Pop, the artists are balancing between the real and digital, existing and producing work inside and about the familiar space that is becoming everyone's reality. By getting inspiration from a variety of sources and covering a wide range of motifs, themes, and visual languages, the artists are getting their physical from their digital, reinventing the classic techniques, formats, and aesthetics, while introducing new ones.
Their vision of a modern day world, contemporary art, social interactions, and self-awareness, are influenced by social media, gaming, TV shows, and popular culture. They use everything from abstraction to realism and deconstructivism to reconstructivism when experimenting with paint on canvas. From spray paint, acrylic paint, oils, airbrush, enamel paint, all the way to the use of nontraditional materials, these artists are creating their own rules on-the-go. Or to put it more precisely, they are breaking the traditional rules, just as the old socio-economical norms are becoming quickly outdated by the fast-paced, digitally-powered, and interconnected world around us.
Post Digital Pop includes new original works by Brandon Lipchik (USA), Brian Willmont (USA), Cathrin Hoffmann (GER), Cesar Piette (FRA), Maja Djordjevic (SER), Philip Geraldo (IRL), and Super Future Kid (UK).
