Curated by Walter Guadagnini and Marco Livingstone

Pop art is usually regarded as an especially American phenomenon, but a British critic, Lawrence Alloway, coined the term, and several British artists of the ’50s (e.g., Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi) antedate the US efflorescence. This exhibition includes some sixty sculptures and mostly large-scale paintings, by eighteen artists who run the gamut from the famous (Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield, Peter Blake) to the fairly obscure (Colin Self, Gerald Laing, and the delicious Pauline Boty, whose canvases are startlingly prescient with respect to David Salle’s work). “The ‘conceptual’ basis of Pop aesthetics were founded in the UK, even if the ‘purest’ Pop art works are probably to be found in the USA,” remarks Galleria Civica director Walter Guadagnini.

— David Rimanelli