Zodiac Pictures is excited to present Pop Life, a group exhibition featuring works by Sylvie Fleury, Kelsey Isaacs, Maggie Lee, Amalia Ulman, and Bruno Zhu. Through various mediums and distinct expressions, these artists employ the strategies and vernacular of pop culture to explore the intersections of consumerism, identity, art, and desire.
Initiating this artistic tendency early in her career, Sylvie Fleury subverts the conventions of consumption by drawing connections between fashion and art, while questioning the relationship between desire and fetishism. In Cuddly Painting (Blush Pink) (2024), a monochrome painting composed of pink synthetic fur, Fleury playfully references the ecological concerns of luxury fashion and the moralistic purity of Minimalism, revealing the inherent contradictions in both.
Kelsey Isaacs stages elaborate sets using found materials such as rhinestone decals, CD cases, vinyl tape, plastic bags, tinsel, and ribbon. She illuminates these saccharine-colored scenes with spotlights, then photographs them. The resulting images serve as source material for her paintings. In her meticulously rendered green&silver1 (2022), Isaacs suspends the intended immediacy of her subject matter with a precision that transcends trompe l’oeil and approaches abstraction.
Working across installation, sculpture, painting, video, and publishing, Maggie Lee navigates between the personal and the pop-cultural. She combines diaristic self-documentation with found media, juxtaposing the aesthetics of DIY culture with mass-produced ephemera. Her ‘vintage paintings’ challenge traditional notions of painting. With her intuitive approach and cut-and-paste methods, Lee evokes a rebellious tone creating compositions that underscore the tension and interplay between memory, nostalgia, and contemporary culture.
Throughout her practice, Amalia Ulman examines how identity and status intertwine with consumer culture. Her projects, often presented in the first person, blur the lines between art and life. For several years, water has been a subject of Ulman’s interest. She shares her ratings and reviews of the waters she has tried on Instagram. In 2023, she attended Doemens Academy in Munich and became a certified water sommelier. On the occasion of Pop Life, Ulman has curated a selection of water for tasting.
Influenced by fashion, design, and scenography, Bruno Zhu’s work engages viewers in questioning and rewriting collective narratives. His recent body of work includes an alphabet of large-scale textile letters and a series of wearable sculptures in the shape of punctuation marks. Featured in this exhibition is True! (2024), an exclamation point (!) comprised of two custom-tailored skirts (a maxi and a mini) in size 6 US.
While artists have long engaged with pop, its recent proliferation and permeation of daily life has increasingly obscured the distinctions between consumer, creator, producer, and product. The works in this exhibition exploit the ambiguities of these shifting roles and highlight the potentials and paradoxes of this new reality.
