Apple first subverted traditional fine art display techniques and materials as a Pop art strategy in the early 1960s. In Love For Sale, 1961 he incorporated gallery furniture into the...
Apple first subverted traditional fine art display techniques and materials as a Pop art strategy in the early 1960s. In Love For Sale, 1961 he incorporated gallery furniture into the art work by painting the plinth with blue and white stripes in reference to a butcher’s apron and the heart is pierced by a real price tag from a butcher’s shop. Love For Sale in many ways sums up the emerging freewheeling youth culture.
In the forward for a 1963 exhibition catalogue titled Pop Art, Mark Glazebrook wrote ‘Pop Art has succeeded in doing what a few years ago seemed impossible in England — it has put the human being and the human object back into Art. Culture, in the hands of the culture manufacturers has been so refined that we find ourselves being fed with Whiter than White, devitalized, homogenized gravy in hermetically sealed galleries. Pop Art marks a return to the good red beef of life.’
London, RBA Galleries, Young Contemporaries exhibition, 1962
London, Gallery One, Live-Stills: Apple Sees Red (first solo exhibition), 1963
Wellington, Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University and The Gus Fisher Gallery at The University of Auckland, The Expatriates: Frances Hodgkins / Barrie Bates, 23 October – 13 February 2005, 29 September – 9 December 2005. ill in cat. p. 24
Rotterdam, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, A History of the Brand, 31–13 September 2009
London, The Mayor Gallery, Billy Apple: British and American Works 1960-1969, 16 September – 30 October 2010. ill. in cat. p. 12 & p. 41
Nijmegen, Museum het Valkhof Nijmegen, Pop Art, 8 September 2012-13 January 2013, ill. p. 95
London, The Mayor Gallery, Not Bronze, 1 February - 30 March 2023
Literature
Christina Barton, Billy Apple: A life in parts, 2015, Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki, ill. p. 14
Christina Barton, Billy Apple®: Life/Work, Auckland University Press, 2020, ill. p. 46