Resumen de Realism, Brutalism, Pop
This essay explores how the concerns that brought together artists, architects and cultural commentators in the informally constituted Independent Group played out in an important body of work produced by Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Notable for its depth and range of cultural and political resonance, this work was characterized by commitment to experimental montage and embrace of the heterogeneity of contemporary culture that set it at odds with the formal orthodoxies of mainstream modernism. The tensions, often productive, that emerged between its more pop-orientated and its more brutalist tendencies are discussed. As in a lot of experimental work of the period, a realist impulse was clearly in evidence. It was realism of a distinctively modern kind, one not of depiction but of evocative imagemaking – of fascination with confi gurations that were resonant with the diverse, contradictory impulses of contemporary society.
