Andy Warhol- Pop Art

Andy Warhol - Pop Art - began as a commercial illustrator. He was a very successful one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I. Miller in a stylish blotty line that derived from Ben Shahn.
He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962. The Ferus Gallery in LA showed his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62.

Most of Warhol's best work was done over a span of 6 years, finishing in 1968. Then he was shot. It all flowed from one central insight. In a culture glutted with info, where most people experience most things through TV and print, images that become disassociated by repeated many times. There is role for affectless art. You can be without feelings, cool, like a frosted mirror. Not that Warhol worked this out. Andy felt it and embodied it, and was a conduit for a collective American state of mind in which celebrity had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity.

Artists, like Monet, had painted the same motif in series in order to display minute discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack... and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand.

Andy Warhol's 32 soup cans're about nothing of the kind. It is about sameness : same brand, same fame as product, size, paint surface. They mimic the mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. These cans are more deadpan than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans.

It is in the repetition of stars' faces such as Liz, Marilyn, Marlon, Jackie..., and as a record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator it speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a media saturated culture.

Andy Warhol extended it by using silk screen. What was suggested, it is not the humanizing touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error...

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New Millenniun - NeoPopRealism - Nadia Russ.

Nadia Russ in New York City: Black Ink, Lipstick & Nail Polish

The Manhattan Motorcars presents Nadia Russ' Prints "Luxury Cars" till December 31st, 2008.Nadia Russ starring the collection of fabulous super-cars prints: Rolls-Royces and Bentley. Two originals from this series are in the permanent collection of MOYA - Museum of Young Art in Vienna, Austria.

Nadia Russ is best known as a NeoPopRealism creator (www.neopoprealism.org), and for her ability to capture the essence of contemporary life, showing her vision through (mostly) faces. She uses bright and vivid colours and flowing lines, combining brightness and simplicity of Pop Art with deep and meaningful realism.

Her energetic portraits and objects which carry the extraordinary feeling of harmony and charm have attained an iconic status and are unprecedented in their focus on developing her ideas.

Still in progress, the art series stretches over a period of nearly 20 years – from artistic surrealist experiments in Moscow (1989) and exhibit in the famous Manege (1990). In 2003 she manifested NeoPopRealism. Her innovative artwork was collected by several US and European museums, such as MOYA (Viena, Austria); Ukrainian Museum in New York (USA); WEAM - World Erotic Art Museum (Miami, USA); Kinsey Institute (Indiana Univerity, USA); Simferopol, Sumy, Lebedyn Art Museums in Ukraine, and other reputable art collections worldwide.Nadia Russ' art works are a window to the fashionable and worldly, there is a unique sense of glamour, particularly Nadia's cars at Manhattan Motorcars. She uses black ink and lipstick with nail polish. There is everything: her aesthetic accomplishments, cultivated taste, social ease, a general unrest...

Her works are pleasing to the eye, immediate in their connection to the viewer, humorous, deep or lighthearted. They have been characterized as NeoPopRealism that she created, a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both Pop Art and Realism.

The exhibition is organized into a series of the sections beginning with an introduction artwork that were donated to MOYA, the first museum of the art of the new millennium. Nadia Russ motto is “Harmony, Style and Glamour in Everything.” She focuses on the stylistic developments and concerns.

A number of standing portraits are remarkably astute in their use of the subject as vehicle for formal explorations of flatness, light, and vivid color.

Nadia Russ likes detachment and deliberately cultivates an impersonal look about her works and their subjects.Russ’s interest in fashion in general – what clothes, cars, architecture... mean and say – and her timeless sense of style are evident in her work presented in this exhibition.

We note that Nadia Russ' works are emblematic of far more: they chart the changes in American art and culture of the new millennium, challenge current theories of feminism and representation, and remind that this is an artist who understands art history from the Renaissance to Jeff Koonz and Damien Hirst.Nadia Russ born in Ukrainian town of Konotop in Russian family. After graduating from high school (in Konotop), then music college (in Kursk), she In 1979 moved to Moscow. There, four years during Perestroika she was working as a free-lance journalist. Her interviews with Russian congressmen had been published in such reputable publications as "Russian Justice" and "Music Life..."(1986-1990).

She took brush in her hand seriously only in 1989. In few month (in 1990) her first drawings were exhibited in the group show in Manege, near Red Square, the most prestigious exhibition place in Russia...Today her art works are in the permanent collections of over 10 museums worldwide. She is viewed as a mentor for the new generations of artists.

2008