The Special Exhibition Gallery, Reading Museum & Town Hall, Reading, RG1 1QH.

A photographic exhibition opening at Reading Museum in Berkshire is the study of eight young ‘Mods’ to reflect how the movement from the 1960s still endures in society today.

Photographer Dean Chalkley

Link to Museum

Antonio de Felipe is a Spanish pop artist whose work is heavily influenced by pop culture, Hollywood, classic art and movies, animation, advertising, and simply growing up in Spain. Among the actresses he frequently depicts are Audrey Hepburn (as well as melding different sources) and Marilyn Monroe. He has also recreated some international masterpieces in pop art form. Some may be familiar with his work from the art he created for Pedro Almodóvar’s film Live Flesh. Altogether, his work transcends national boundaries while still maintaining a distinct Spanish flavor.

The lines between the beautiful and the absurd are effaced in the paintings of Antonio de Felipe. Anyone venturing to study his pictures must be prepared for the unexpected, for suddenly you may find Betty Boop dancing hand in hand with Snow White and Superman. Such are his subject worlds – a surprising genre blend, a linking of series characters, classical art, Gothic literature and commercialism side by side with contemporary icon worship.

Antonio de Felipe has painted portraits of brilliant actors whose icon status is secure. Two of them are Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo, seen against a wide range of backgrounds – Picasso’s brutal Guernica or space figures reminiscent of Miró, as a third, Marilyn Monroe, parts her ruby lips downstage.
These film star portraits are frequently stylised, though sensitive, created with a uniform colour scale that shifts between shades of yellow, red and blue.

Antonio de Felipe was born in Valencia 1965 and attended the Bellas Artes de Valencia school of art. His home of many years is Madrid.
Together with MariaManuela, Cecilia Cubarle, Philippe Huart and William Sweetlove among others, Antonio de Felipe is one of the members in the group Les nouveauX pop, which has had several exhibitions in Europe and Asia.

Playing with the stereotypical language of the advertising world is the distinguishing characteristic of his work. One example of this can be seen in the paraphrase on Diego Velásquez famous Las Meninas, Spanish for ‘The Maids of Honour’, painted in 1656. Instead of the glass of cold, perfumed water in the original, he places a Fanta soft drink in the hand of the young Spanish princess Margarita.
The princess with the flounce dress. Gold brocade on her bodice. Oranges in her black hair. Always reaching for the ingenious detail.

(thanx to galeriebirch.com)

antoniodefelipe.es

1955, Victor Vasarely, Hungarian artist installed in France, publishes the Yellow, manifest Manifesto of the Kinetic art, current which will be prolonged with Op’ art until in the years 1965. In which context socio-politico-industrialist this artist did have the audacity to publish? We are ten years after the signature of the fine armistice of 1945 putting at the Second World War.

The world is henceforth divided into two blocks, in the east the Soviet block and the west the member countries of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including in other France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the United States and Canada). Europe builds itself gradually, with in 1951 the creation of ECSC, the European common primary market of coal and steel and in 1957 the signature of the treaties of Rome officializing the EEC, the European Economic community.