Made in Britain

Ian Davenport, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Michael-Craig Martin, Harland Miller, Julian Opie

David Benrimon Fine Art presents Made in Britain, an exhibition that features a carefully curated selection from the most influential Pop artists to come out of Britain in the 20th and 21st century. Spanning several decades of artistic evolution, the exhibition bridges the gap between pioneers of the mid-20th-century British Pop movement and the contemporary heavyweights who evolved from it. These artists have redefined contemporary fine art through their interpretation of the mundane, taking popular culture as a source of inspiration and employing provocative design and printing techniques into high art.

Both institutionally recognized worldwide, David Hockney and Michael Craig Martin are masters of transforming everyday objects and their surrounding environments into fine art. Perhaps best known for his serial paintings of swimming pools, portraits of friends, and lush landscapes, a selection of David Hockney's 20 Flowers iPad series as well as his earlier still lives are featured in the show. Alongside Hockney, the exhibition highlights Michael Craig-Martin's foundational, minimalist deconstructions of everyday objects, a distinction from Hockney's painterly interpretation of life. Craig-Martin began drawing everyday objects in the mid-1970s, and his compositions purposefully lack individualizing details and contextual references. His practice probes the relationship between sign, language, and object, which he exploits through his vibrant tones and simplified lines. In blurring the divide between mass culture and high art, his work is aligned with Pop Art discourses, funneled through a conceptual lens.

Damien Hirst and Julian Opie were students of Michael-Craig Martin at the Goldsmith College in the 1970s and 80s, highlighting how the legacy of this twentieth-century master seamlessly connects to the spirit of the younger generation, represented by Damien Hirst's provocative conceptual works and Julian Opie's clean and simplified silhouettes. At the center of the exhibition is Damien Hirst's In Love With You; a painting showcasing his most recognizable motif; butterflies dominating the compositions, seemingly fluttering against a bold heart-shaped background. Through his use of non-art materials across a multitude of media, Hirst explores the binary relations that structure our everyday lives: life and death, good and evil, love and hate.

Further examining the intersections of everyday life and high art, Julian Opie's oeuvre also references mundane imagery through his instantly recognizable, digitized urban figures. A recent lenticular edition, Children Walking is a quintessential example of his bold black outlines taking inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints, hieroglyphics, and universal symbols such as traffic signs. By elevating everyday objects, commercial motifs, and consumer landscapes, the exhibition explores how these distinct voices have challenged traditional definitions of craftsmanship, materiality, and fine art.