Media Networks

Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!  1963

Whaam! is based on an image published in 1962 in the DC comic, All American Men of War. Lichtenstein often drew on commercial art sources such as comics and advertisements. He was interested how they depict highly emotional subject matter relating to love or war in a cool, impersonal way.

Gallery label, August 2018

Cildo Meireles, Babel  2001

Babel 2001 is a large-scale sculptural installation that takes the form of a circular tower made from hundreds of second-hand analogue radios that the artist has stacked in layers. The radios are tuned to a multitude of different stations and are adjusted to the minimum volume at which they are audible. Nevertheless, they compete with each other and create a cacophony of low, continuous sound, resulting in inaccessible information, voices or music.

Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman  1944

This portrait of the photographer Dora Maar was painted on 5 May 1944. Her reconfigured features may reflect the complex atmosphere of the final weeks of the Nazi Occupation of Paris. Deprivation and tension remained high in the city. In February two of Picasso’s closest Jewish friends – the poets Robert Desnos and Max Jacob – had been deported. Yet there were also signs of defiance and hope: in March, Maar took part alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in a clandestine performance of Picasso’s play Desire Caught by the Tail, directed by Albert Camus.

Gallery label, February 2016

Cildo Meireles, Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project  1970

Meireles altered a series of Coca-Cola bottles, by printing slogans such as ‘Yankees go home’ or instructions for making Molotov cocktails on them. He put them back into circulation in what he described as an act of subversive ‘mobile graffiti’, enacted under Brazil’s military dictatorship. He saw the system of recycling empty bottles as a way of enabling a political message to circulate surreptitiously. He has compared the Coca-Cola bottles to ‘messages in bottles, flung into the sea by victims of shipwrecks’.

Gallery label, February 2016