What defines pop surrealism?

Lowbrow, also known as pop surrealism, is a groundbreaking and unconventional art movement that emerged in the late 1960s in Los Angeles and the West Coast. Characterized by its fusion of high and low culture, the movement has produced a wealth of compelling, evocative, and often controversial works.

Indeed, Pop Surrealism appears to have married the two stances in art that tackle very different topics. While Surrealism was based on dreams and the unconscious, Pop art depicted the mundane and the superficial.

Characteristics of Pop Art

The Lowbrow art movement, also known as Pop Surrealism, was born out of Los Angeles' underground culture in the 1970s. Since its very beginning, Lowbrow has borrowed from the best.

In the United States, pop style was a return to representational art (art that depicted the visual world in a recognisable way) and the use of hard edges and distinct forms after the painterly looseness of abstract expressionism.

10 Unique Pop Art Characteristics

The Surrealist movement continues to influence popular culture today and elements of its style can be found in many well known contemporary works.

A style subsequent to dada was surrealism, another movement that was influential to pop art. Surrealism depicted bizarre scenes and dream imagery. They lacked the more radical political dimensions of dada, but retained a certain playfulness which would later be seen in pop art.

The characteristics of surrealism include strange images or bizarre juxtapositions, unconsciousness as a valid reality, dream-like artwork or symbolic images, automatism techniques to create random effects, distorted figures or biomorphic shapes, depiction of perverse sexuality, and chance or spontaneity.

Andy Warhol sums up his action to make art a product of mass consumption. Through involvement in many aspects of what Pop art has been like as a whole, Andy Warhol has become an almost inseparable embodiment. It was the lifelong artistic dedication to a movement that earned Warhol recognition as the Father of Pop Art.

From a humble childhood in Communist Cuba to becoming one of America's most sought-after pop artists, Nelson De La Nuez is one of art's biggest living icons.

Although it did not have a specific style or attitude, Pop art was defined as a diverse response to the postwar era's commodity-driven values, often using commonplace objects (such as comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers) as subject matter or as part of the work.

The Lowbrow art movement sought to challenge the elitism and exclusivity of highbrow art by incorporating popular culture, comic books, graffiti, street art, and subcultural elements into its visual vocabulary.

In brief, surrealist abstraction rejected geometric shapes in favor of the visual and emotional impact of organic forms of nature: either actual (Jean Arp, Andre Masson, Joan Miro) or imagined (Yves Tanguy, Robert Matta). The non-representational direction of Surrealism was no less vigorous.

Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious.

In 1957, Richard Hamilton described the style, writing: “Pop art is: popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business.” Often employing mechanical or commercial techniques such as silk-screening, Pop Art uses repetition and mass production to subvert ...

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. The concept that there is no hierarchy of culture and that art may borrow from any source has been one of the most influential characteristics of Pop Art.

It was English Pop Artist Richard Hamilton who, in 1957, listed the characteristics of Pop Art, “Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business.”

The primary themes of pop art are:

Part of what makes Pop art unique is that it rejects the notion of uniqueness. Instead of trying to be unique, pop artists embraced mass-production and elements from popular culture. Artworks in the Pop art style often employ commercial techniques such as silk screening to produce multiple replicas of artwork.

We can divide Surrealism into two main types; veristic art and automatism art.

For example, the Harry Potter books include a lot of strange and unusual characters, creatures, and events. And yet they would not be classified as surrealist. Surrealist fiction isn't concerned with making the unreal feel real. Instead, writing surrealist fiction means fully embracing the strangeness in the story.

Some single-mindedly pursued a spontaneous revelation of the unconscious, freed from the controls of the conscious mind, while others, notably the Catalan painter Joan Miró (though he never officially joined the group), used Surrealism as a liberating starting point for an exploration of personal fantasies, conscious ...

It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, impish, or a sarcastic comment. Most lowbrow artworks are paintings, but there are also toys, digital art, and sculpture.

Below, we celebrate 8 of the most famous Surrealist artists, whose artworks continue to fascinate audiences today.

The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso are sometimes included on this list but they never officially joined the Surrealist group.