Take A Picture Make A Picture

The exhibition explores a considered meld of an individual artistic gesture and popular imagery in iconic paintings by Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Rudolf Stingel and Christopher Wool – the key exponents of the generation which came of age in the 1980s. Through distinct visual modes, the artists painstakingly portray mass-produced decorative patterns, excerpts from advertising or popular cartoons, which at times bear traces of the hand. Configured into dynamic compositions via layering, repetition and collage, the readymade imagery transforms into an unlikely channel for personal expression, signifying the artists’ complex attitudes to the notions of authorship and originality.

Employing mass-produced tools used for domestic decoration such as pattern rollers and rubber stamps, Christopher Wool merges the image with the process of its making. In Untitled (1991), the predictability of the vine print clashes with coincidental distortions caused by the artist’s hand, instilling the work with the sense of muted yet resolute expression. In a humorous exchange on the influence of Robert Gober’s hand-made sculptures of household sinks on his own work, the artist emphasised: