I visited this exhibition at the V&A, initially as part of cultural and critical studies module, but it was an extremely large exhibition with lots to offer. The show takes you on a trip between 1966 and 1970, five years which defined significance and have impacted our present and our future.

I learnt a lot from it and found out various things which engaged me in the decade of 1960s. A large theme throughout was the message of freedom, and the summer of love (1967) amongst this was an era of new technologies, as well as experimentation of drugs as a source of creative inspiration sparked and opened doors to new ways of making art.

Within the exciting themes and the likes of LSD, Twiggy, The Beatles, David Bowie, Woodstock 1969 and Barbarella, for me the style and work of Andy Warhol stood out significantly as an area of interest. Andy Warhol was a painter, film-maker and author and most importantly a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. Something I noticed and learnt from the exhibition was that consumerism and advertisement was something of growth at the time. In the 1960s, Warhol began to experiment with such advertisements, such as famously known Campbell’s soup tins and Coca Cola bottles. The 1960s was also a generation of many stars, such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Twiggy, where Warhol started to produce portrait pop arts, where he painted the likes of Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Twiggy which are all iconic. When researching more about Warhol and these type of images, I found out that he used photographic silkscreen to produce them, which is a process I have not used myself before. On Warhol’s website it says that this method of printing creates a very precise and defined imagine which can also allow the artist to mass produce a large number of prints with relevant ease. This again interests me as it ties in with and relates back to the exhibition where consumerism and mass production were new things of the genre. Warhol adopted the methods of mass production to make images of movie stars that were themselves mass-produced. Warhol depicted these universally recognized things, such as the Campbell’s cans or Marilyn Monroe as mass produced items, within a fine art context. By creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars, the Pop art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between “high” art and “low” culture.