Bradley, the curator here at HOTA Gallery, and Elliott a music producer, soundtrack curator, and film composer whose most recent work was featured in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic Elvis, discussed their take on Pop Art, and shed some insight into the world exclusive exhibition coming to Gold Coast shore's next month.

Bern Young:  If Pop Art is based on modern popular culture, then how do we define Pop Art but based on the culture of decades long gone? Does the work of Andy Warhol for instance still have as much, if not more relevance now than when he was making it? What are we instore for here Down Under? 

Bradley Vincent: We are so excited at HOTA that it’s not long now until we’ll get to host our first international show, and we couldn’t think of a better place to start than with Pop Art, as it feels like the most ‘Gold Coast’ of genres, so bringing these works here for the first time is truly remarkable.  

Bern: Is Pop Art now the same as Pop Art then? And should I bother trying with a definition- because let’s face it- that always gets a bit boring when it comes to art? 

BV: It’s something I struggle with every time I’m asked, as it’s a big and complicated genre. At its core what it does is it takes material of the world around us, particularly the consumer culture and celebrity culture, as well as the objects of our everyday lives, and it transforms them into art. Before someone like Andy Warhol, art was a serious matter about serious topics. The abstract expressionists in America were looking at matters of religion and all these big life questions- but what Andy did (and many others) was they took the materials of the world on the street and turned them into gallery worthy objects.  

Bern: Can we talk music for a minute- what’s it like to create a playlist for an art exhibition as opposed to providing a soundtrack for a film?  

Elliott Wheeler: I was so thrilled to be asked by Bradley and HOTA to be involved in this. I was slightly overwhelmed, as the concept of Pop music is so all encompassing and particularly the era of music that occurred around the time of Basquiat, Haring and Warhol was so prolific- particularly the New York experience, and that’s sort of where we are basing our musical experience (for the exhibition). 

Bern: Let’s talk for a second about Keith Haring- where does he fit into Pop Art, and other than being collected by the Mugrabi Family, why does he belong in this Pop Masters exhibition? 

BV: What I think Keith Haring did really successfully, alongside someone like Basquiat, is to take the visual language of the streets of the time, and take them into the gallery. He started making works in the subways in New York… taking that literal language of the streets and bringing it inside the galleries.  

Bern: What does it take for an artist to go from being a graffiti artist of the streets, to being a wanted artist- not just putting on shows, but selling them out? 

BV: It’s a unique time when the artworld really shifted under people like Warhol- seeing new potential for forms of art, so I think it’s a matter of right place, right time for a new set of voices being welcomed into the art world. 

Bern: How crazy was it all at the time- because now we just accept Andy Warhol for exactly who he was and what he did, but at the time how’s he being perceived in the art world? 

BV: I think his assent was reasonably quick- like when you strike something that speaks so universally, so broadly- it’s hard not to pay attention to that. It’s hard not to pay attention to that legacy- in that it connects directly to people’s experiences.  

EW: I think one of the things that’s really interesting to me about this exhibition is that notion of finding found objects in the everyday… which really links in so closely with the Hip-Hop ethos in many ways.  

Bern: So I’m assuming that a fair bit of that is going to turn up in the playlists for this exhibition? I’m interested in the idea of listening to something while looking at something- I mean we do that all the time with film, but what’s the key difference here? One of the things about a film is that we’re all in it together, whereas when you’re going around an art gallery, it’s a very unique and personal experience. How do you really soundtrack an exhibition? 

EW: We are very, very aware of that- and that’s one of my pet hates when you’re at a gallery and they will have very ‘proper’ music which doesn’t often represent where my headspace is at and you can get very editorialised. What we are going to do with this one is that the playlist will be downloadable- you can scan a QR code which will link you to the playlists if you want to listen on your own devices- and so we won’t have any links to individual pieces. It’s more about creating a sonic world- to give some idea as to what those artists were listening to, and where their headspace was sonically, because it does feed into the art so closely.  

Bern: It’s a private collection Bradley, how do you get your hands on something like this and convince someone to give up their private collection for public viewing- and to bring these pieces together in a way they have never been bought together anywhere in the world?  

BV: The origin story of this exhibition, which has been about 6 years in the making now, and as the world has been crazy for the last few- initially this was going to be the show that we planned to open the Gallery with, but that unfortunately was derailed due to the pandemic… and so we finally have the chance to bring it here. We like to talk about it as this ‘Gold Coast confidence’ to approach one of the world’s largest art collectors and say ‘hey we think this would be a great fit- let’s do this’…. Our fearless director Tracy Cooper-Lavery struck up that conversation and it’s been a wild journey ever since.  

Bern: How did you go about what you get to choose from the collection? 

BV: Due to global travel, it's been tricky and so a lot of remote work. When the show was first conceived it was very much looking at Warhol, and then it was Warhol, Basquiat and Haring, and it’s evolved over the years into something larger. I think what we're building now is a ‘Pop Universe’ so we take those 3 artists as a starting point for the show- as our sort of guide through the show and through the years, and then were adding in 12 other artists. These artists are contemporaries of the big 3, but they’re also contemporary artists still working today to build this picture of a pop universe, and to give a contemporary context to the work of someone like Warhol. 

Bern: What are you most looking forward to in this coming exhibition?  

EW: For me it’s the Basquiat I’m really excited to see. There’s something about seeing the artwork in person, up close like that - there’s such an energy to these works.  

Be part of something extraordinary. Don’t miss Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection, New York exclusively at HOTA Gallery from 18 Feb.