Pop Parade At The Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Pop Parade is the latest celebration of Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s extensive Pop Art collection, and this time, it celebrates not only the great names of the movement, Warhol, Boty, Lichtenstein amongst others, but also looks at a key piece of Pop Art that has a resonance for all those who grew up in the Midlands in the 1970’s.

This key piece of art is King Kong by Nicholas Monro. This fibreglass figure was used as the model for the six metre high statue that stood outside the original Birmingham Bullring in Manzoni Gardens in 1971. It was a figure that was both loved and hated in equal measure, and only stood in the city centre for 6 months before it was sold and moved. Despite only being in place for such a short period of time, it has gained almost mythical status, and it returned to the city, albeit in a new model, during the Commonwealth Games last July. Now the model that started it all is the centrepiece of the Pop Parade exhibition, as vibrant in popular culture as it was in 1933 when the first film appeared on our screens.

As previously mentioned, the Wolverhampton Art Gallery has an exceptional collection of Pop Art, the biggest in the UK outside of London, and it is always great to see some of their best pieces on display. I love Pop Art for it’s focus on the normal and mundane but also on the world of popular culture and celebrity. No Pop Art exhibition is complete without a Campbell’s soup can, or an image of Marilyn Monroe, and this exhibition is just the same, going from the ordinary to the extraordinary by just moving across a room. The Marilyn in this case is Pauline Boty’s ‘Colour her Gone’, one of my absolute fave pieces by one of my fave artists. (Like Marilyn, Boty herself was soon to be gone, dying of cancer at the age of just 29 in 1966.)  Marilyn is also featured alongside that other symbol of America, the Coca Cola bottle, in a piece by Clive Barker, Study For Sculpture (Marilyn on a coke bottle 1969), and there are also works dedicated to Brigitte Bardot, Jackie Kennedy, The Beach Boys, and the Wolfman, showing that celebrity was a big influence on the Pop artists.

One of the great things about the Wolverhampton collection is that there is always something new to see, or an old favourite to enjoy once again. The aforementioned soup can is a modern classic, but this time around I loved the ode to Odeon Cinema Dream palaces, and to the cooling towers that were once a recognisable part of out landscape, but now seem like a relic of a time gone by.

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