The Big Enchilada is a group exhibition that brings together five artists who are exponents of the survival and success of PopArt aesthetics in today’s world: Peter Anton, Rafael Barrios, Mel Bochner, Fidia Falaschetti, Paul Rousso, and Fabián Ugalde.
From different generations and regions, all of them have been inspired by the greats of PopArt and Neo-Pop such as Vlaes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, or Damien Hirst.
With the illusion that the Internet and ICTs would illuminate a new art deflated, the 21st century has been revealed as a triumph of revisionism and the re-readings of the artistic movements that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. That countercultural effervescence of the years after the Second World War has been swallowed up by the system and celebrated in the market, surrounded by the capricious collective imagination of the international body of collectors, curators, gallery owners, and critics (if they still exist).
Conceptual Art, Performance, Action Painting, Activism and Neo-Pop (with their kitsch and hyper-realistic variants I) invade – without apparent contradictions – the contemporary art circuit, offering art à la carte for all palates – although not for all budgets.
Precisely on mass media, taste, consumption, and money (the tetralogy that defines PopArt) is the exhibition that we now present, in which we wanted to bring together four artists who summarize like few others the greatness and miseries of the world today from the irony and technical virtuosity.
They are also an example of the new ways of living, producing, and selling art. The fourth artists work on recognized universal icons of the contemporary world and have a global market that transcends not only national but also intercontinental borders. However, they live and work in small cities far from power and market centers; a symptom of a time when we can be connected and make our voice, and our products, reach the ends of the planet without leaving our site.
Teresa Perez Jofre