Consumerism, politics and civil rights: story of printmaking in US lands in Barcelona

Brought all the way from London’s British museum with a quick stop off in Madrid, the Caixaforum’s latest exhibition ‘El somni americà: Del pop a l’actualitat’ (The American Dream: from pop to the present), hosts over 200 artworks from the United States over the last six decades. 

Some of the world’s most popular artists, such as Andy Warhol, Kiki Smith, Richard Estes, Jim Dine, and Guerrilla Girls are just a few of many well-known names on-show. 

The exhibit details the history of the art of printmaking, rising to popularity in the 1960s with pop-art, and following the discipline’s evolution and encounter with other emerging 20th-century movements such as abstraction, minimalism, and photorealism.

Throughout its tale about printmaking, the exhibition pays great homage to the 60s when the discipline of printmaking developed, once creatives were able to reproduce images multiple times. This encouraged artists to try out new techniques and explore new and revolutionary ways of self-expression.

In even more detail, the history of pop art, the way that it created a new American visual culture, and the appearance of a new type of middle-class, engaged with the artistic world, who wanted to acquire such pieces of work, is explored and examined.

There is also clearly an overarching thematic unity to the exhibition: the American dream, or even more so, its inevitable unattainability. The prints on display are typically politically engaged, frequently focussing on consumerism, civil rights, feminism, and the democratization of the consumption of art, the new techniques presented by pop art ultimately being used as a tool to comment on society.

Catherine Daunt, conservator of modern and contemporary graphic art at the British Museum and curator of the exhibition said during the show’s presentation that “more than anything, it’s a celebration of a wonderfully rich period of American printmaking.”

Works worth seeing include the famous 1973 flag series by Jasper Johns and Guerrilla Girls ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum?’ (1989)