SEFA is pleased to present POP ART 2.0 (Sept. 18 – Nov. 6), featuring the work of painters Charles Buckley and Alex Wood and photographer Lars Klingstedt. Employing contemporary resources and technology, a new generation of artists appropriate advertising text, media style and images of celebrity icons to create a new art inspired by mass culture.

Marrying abstract expressionism with a Pop sensibility, British-born Alex Wood begins each work with a word or phrase, derived from advertising text or classic punk imagery. Layers of abstract brushwork—in acrylic and spray paint—slash, circle, conceal and rub up against the words. In so doing, Wood questions the nature of both verbal and visual communication and the viewer’s relationship to them.

Engaged in quintessential American pastimes—driving, hunting, shooting, sports—Brooklyn-based Charles Buckley’s figures are captured in two-dimensional storybook fashion, flattened on canvas. Inspired by figures, diagrams and the graphic quality of trade magazines, advertisements and comic books, Buckley examines how the form is used to sell product and titillate consumers.

A native of El Paso, Texas, Lars Klingstedt is a fine art photographer and fashion designer who explores the intersection of these two art forms. Employing Photoshop technology, Klingstedt reduces iconic celebrity photographs to their bare, stylized essentials, revealing the subject’s crystalline, linear beauty, much in the way that a designer sketches the essential lines of an haute couture piece.

more information and more works by the artists