The Pop Art movement, most often associated with Andy Warhol, is alive in the life and work of Steve Kaufman.  An associate and friend of Warhol during his most ferociously creative period, Kaufman’s work is clearly derivative but Kaufman insists that he is taking the pop art movement into new territory.

Kaufman, who began as a comic book artist, moved beyond the stark images lifted from photographs that brought Warhol international recognition.  His work has evolved into cutting edge collages of iconographic images adding multiple layers of meaning and social relevance to a movement that started over 40 years ago.

The term “Pop Art” was coined by English critic Lawrence Alloway for a movement flourishing, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, chiefly in the USA and Britain that was based on the imagery of consumerism and popular culture.

Comic books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the cinema were all part of the iconography of the movement.  The movement rejected any distinction between good and bad taste.

Pop artists like Kaufman and Warhol focused on familiar images from popular culture and made fun of industry and mass production by mass-producing their own art.

Today Kaufman is as involved in observing culture through art as he is in changing the injustices of culture itself by hiring inner city youth, gang members and ex-con’s to assist in producing his paintings.  Kaufman’s originals hang in the homes of Al Pacino, Elizabeth Taylor and John Travolta.