A dive into “The Pop Years” at the Mémorial de Caen

An ultra-colourful work on which we discover the stunning juxtaposition of a pin-up basking within the center of a paradisiacal landscape and an American aircraft making ready to drop its bombs on Vietnam. This worrying portray by means of Bernard Rancillac ought to sum up the exhibition “Pop Years, Shock Years”.

“It is a question of displaying how the artists devoted themselves to conveying the weather of the years 1960-1975 in addition to possible”, explains the curator of the exhibition Yan Schubert. Indeed, we find ourselves in a few moments as if projected into those works, regularly inspired by using cinema or maybe comedian strips, however exceptionally in this era marked pell-mell by way of the struggle in Vietnam of path, the combat towards dictatorships or still the primary supermarkets. Objects punctuate the go to consisting of these Coca-Cola bottles, this Honda bike or the representations of miniskirts, so emblematic of these pop years.

“A defining decade”

Heckled with the aid of the illustration of all these upheavals and the feelings they arouse, we all of sudden discover ourselves flabbergasted in front of a semi-automated pistol discovered near a mass grave in Eastern Europe, placed there to crudely take into account the scars of Nazism. And the trials that followed all through the Sixties.

“It is all the chaos of this decisive decade that we find out here. Each of those works enables us apprehend the geopolitical and social modifications that occurred at that point. It turned into the beginning of the purchaser society and of most of the fundamental questions that still occupy us these days,” assures Jean-Claude Gandur, president of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, proprietor of all of the works. It’s captivating, and consequently often transferring, for example whilst every other artist suggests the horrors of the Franco dictatorship or whilst a poster comes to remind us of some of the first actual feminist slogans, like this: “there is more unknown than the unknown soldier – his spouse”

 

Pop Years, surprise years, 1960-1975 exhibition, from June 22 to December 31, 2023, on the Mémorial de Caen, Esplanade Général Eisenhower. Entrance: 10€. Contact: 02 31 06 06 45