Twin exhibitions highlight Pop Art and treasures from Grundy’s collection

Major works of Pop Art will be on display at the Grundy this Easter alongside highlights  from its collection.

Encompassing both historical and contemporary work from the gallery’s collection as well as new international commissions, this Easter’s programme at Blackpool’s Grundy Art Gallery will range from Picasso to Pop Art, including favourites such as Gilbert and George, Sir Peter Blake and Eric Ravilious, alongside new works by Haroon Mirza, Helen Marten and Heather Phillipson.

Pre-Pop to Post-Human: Collage in the Digital Age and THINGS: A Century of Works Purchased with the Contemporary Art Society will both run from 6 March – 11 April and will fill the entire downstairs galleries.

Pop culture is at the heart of Blackpool and the exhibition Pre-Pop to Post-Human offers gallery-goers the chance to see some seminal works from the Pop Art movement in Britain.

A Hayward Touring Exhibition from Southbank Centre, London, the show begins with BUNK—Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1952 presentation of collage, which heralded the advent of Pop Art in Britain and goes on to feature thirty-seven newly-commissioned prints by fifteen young artists of today. Like the 1950s show, the new exhibition features art which juxtaposes images from popular culture to reflect and reinterpret the preoccupations of its own times.

Pre Pop to Post Human will be shown alongside a new exhibition drawn from the Grundy’s own collection. THINGS: A Century of Works Purchased with the Contemporary Art Society will display, for the first time, all the works purchased with the Contemporary Art Society for the Grundy’s collection since the birth of both organisations in the early twentieth century.

Visitors will be able to see some of the gallery’s most iconic works including those by Picasso, Gilbert and George, Peter Blake and Julian Trevelyan.

The exhibition will also bring together all the works recently purchased jointly with four other North West galleries: the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, The Walker Art Gallery and The Victoria Gallery. Those include work from Brian Griffiths, Haroon Mirza and Helen Marten, alongside recent purchases of Heather Phillipson.

Cllr Christine Wright, Blackpool Council’s cabinet member for culture and heritage said: “THINGS presents an opportunity for audiences to see some of the Grundy’s best-loved works from a variety of world-class artists. It also offers a local history of how ‘the contemporary’ has evolved in Blackpool over the course of the twentieth century.

“Both exhibitions promise to be fascinating to take a look around and I would encourage everybody to come along and take a look at some of the top class art that Blackpool has to offer.”