Nearly five decades after emerging as a Pop Artist, Clive Barker continues to make sculptures characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture. Today, as then Barker's art sets out to reflect its own time. Icons of advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects are removed from their context and typically isolated, combined or transformed for contemplation by the viewer. The ever-present ad-mass culture has seen to it that Pop Art has held its place and remains an exciting, vigorous art movement.
Barker's 1960s work by and large celebrated the possibilities and freedoms of a transformed society, segmented in chrome-plated bronze casts of the everyday, the banal or kitsch elements of our culture, often through the use of irony.
Although Barker's recent use of polished bronze revives the manufactured, shiny and new gift-wrapped feeling of his 1960's chrome plated objects, his present iconography is charged with a different content, as it contemplates and investigates the outcome of mass-consumerism proclaimed as the way forward during the heyday of Pop.
An Jo Fermon
