Summary
Isabel Oliver Cuevas was rediscovered in 2015 for her Spanish Pop art work, included in the exhibition The World Goes Pop at the Tate Modern in London, England. Oliver is associated with Spanish pop through her collaboration with the artist collective Equipo Crónica (Chronicle Team), founded in Valencia in 1964 by Rafael Solbes, Manuel (Manolo) Valdés (1942), and Joan Antoni Toledo. They invited Oliver to join them in 1971, when Pop art and the so-called New Figuration was influencing the work of the group.
Oliver collaborated with the Team for four years and, around the same time, she produced the important The Woman series from 1970 to 1973. Through this series Oliver examined popular culture in relation to images of women during the last decade of Franco's regime. Representative of a younger generation of women with feminist attitudes in the seventies, she overtly expressed her political views, taking advantage of Pop art's effects and strategies. Oliver analyzed and criticized the discriminatory situation of Spanish women under Franco's dictatorship, the very political situation in which she was living and of which she was a part.
While the majority of the focus regarding Pop art has centered on American and British artists, the Spanish artist Isabel Oliver provides a good example of one of the many less recognized artists around the world who appropriated Pop art strategies and effects. Additionally, she demonstrates how artists moved beyond their critique of popular culture and sought a deeper understanding of the everyday through an archaeological examination of materials and their traces.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Happy Reunion (1970-73)
Happy Reunion is a central image of Oliver's iconic series The Woman (1970-73), which examines different aspects of femininity in Franco's Spain. Here, the happy women in the home are presented in stark contrast to the surreal and unsettling scenes of violence and despair in the world outside. Depicted as oblivious to the dangers of the "real world" the women sit in happy ignorance ensconced in their domestic sphere, even as an unsettling figure encroaches on them. By depicting how some middle-class women shielded themselves from reality, Oliver visually draws the viewer's attention to the fake appearance of normalcy that women were expected to maintain.
The Woman series addresses such popular issues as physical appearance (beauty), childhood, and domesticity by manipulating common media generated images. Oliver used her art to make powerful feminist and political statements about the ways Spanish society repressed women during the turbulent years of General Franco's dictatorship in which this series is set.
Self-portrait of the Artist (1970s)
Beauty Products (1970-73)
Many Pop artists re-purposed household products in their work to comment on commercialized society, while in Oliver's work beauty products become a vehicle for visualizing the pressure such commercial products impose on women. In Beauty Products, a woman seems to rush forward, perhaps in an effort to stay on top of the latest styles, brands, and beauty trends that appear available in a never-ending supply. Referencing the oppressive pressure placed on women to achieve the societal notions of beauty and perfection, this woman seems harried and overwhelmed in her attempt to achieve this impossible task. This work demonstrates how Pop art effects could be applied to critique any number of issues in popular culture, some even from a feminist point of view. Describing the motivations behind this work, Oliver has stated she wanted to draw attention to, "...women's struggle against discrimination in their lives and in all spheres of society."
The Family (1970-73)
The game board, which is overlaid on the nuclear family, is the popular Spanish board game Parchís, in which the players compete in leading the pawns (game pieces) out of the nest. On one level, the board game serves as a metaphor for the game of life that a woman plays in her societally restricted familial role, following the rules along the prescribed path to its end. Looked at another way, the board game represents the common family activity of playing an entertaining game together. However, a social game of gender roles is played out beneath the surface of the board game. This family sits neither concerned by their prescribed roles, nor conveying a picture of contentment. So beneath the surface of family life: the domestic bliss that the woman especially, as mother and wife, was expected to put forth and try to maintain, is a competitive social game. A reality contradicted by media images that support the notion of female domestic bliss.
Portraits, still lifes, and landscapes (Retratos, bodegones y paisajes) The Recuperation (La Recuperación) (1972)
Isabel Oliver Artist Overview Page
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