The Tom Wesselmann exhibition presented in winter 2024-2025 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton celebrates pop art, the emblematic movement of the 1960s inseparable from American visual culture. Rejecting traditional art conventions, pop art has redefined the boundaries of creation by making art inseparable from everyday life, integrating industrial techniques, prefabricated materials and mass-market objects. Through figures like Andy Warhol and his Campbell’s Soups or Roy Lichtenstein and his vibrant color comics, this artistic movement has questioned the status of the work of art while capturing the spirit of its time.
This matter of the nature of the work of art remains central today, especially through digital art, which pushes the limits of creative processes thanks to new technologies. So it’s no surprise that digital art is taking on the legacy of pop art, adopting often joyful, sometimes repetitive shapes, colors and patterns, while drawing inspiration from the visual codes of mass distribution or everyday objects. But, like pop art, behind an apparent lightness, these works also question deeper issues, such as our relationship to overconsumption or the omnipresence of technologies in our lives.
Thus, pop art and digital art dialogue through the decades, helping us to reinvent our view of the contemporary world.