Brand new kitsch world

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As a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950’s, pop art aims to emphasise the nature of things that are popular in our daily routine. It presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from advertising, news, comics and fashion.
Presenting her bold and edgy style, contemporary pop artist Surita Tandon has come up with her solo exhibition “Popsicles” in the capital.
Talking about her works Surita says, “My work includes bright and colourful, digitalised canvases depicting popular icons and commonplace objects ranging from fashion, music and everyday art like a Chained Madonna, Prada In Colours and Diet Coke Can.”
The subject matter of Surita’s work is something far from traditional “high art” themes of morality, mythology and classic history. The artist seems to be celebrating commonplace objects and people of everyday life.
“The concept that there is no hierarchy of culture and that art may borrow from any source has been one of the most influential features of pop art and that is what is reflected in my works,” says Surita.
So what made your fascination shift from the Buddha to the Beatles? Surita shares, “I started my career in commercial art, depicting Buddha in all its glory, female faces and nudes in monochromatic colours. The use of the brush over the canvas was just slated to bring about common man’s spiritual desires, pleasure and pain. It did not however, give the zest and excitement of the finished canvas in me. I needed something different, edgy, exotic and eye-catching. So, I shifted my focus to pop culture, pop icons, drip art against a backdrop of a reclining Madonna.”
The curator of the show Bhavna Kakar says, “Surita makes immediate reference to revered consumerist brands in her works, keen on breaking down hierarchies of appropriate subject matter by including everyday scenes of commercial life. Photography acts as the foundation for her work in order to create a detached and impersonal effect, which gains an affinity with both pop and minimalism style of art.”

The exhibition will be on till March 15 at G-13 Maharani Bagh from 4 pm to 7 pm