Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art 6/27/09

Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art On Saturday I had the opportunity to go to the exhibit at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. Currently featured is Classic Contemporary: Lichtenstein, Warhol & Friends. I have been wanting to see this show since I first heard about it and my Humanities class gave me the perfect reason to attend, so this weekend when I went home to Vegas I made a point to go. When I walked into the room it was silent with only a few people strolling by admiring the artwork. Immediately to the left six enormous Campbell's Soup cans hung, framed in thin silver, three by three on the white wall. Though the image was repeated each can was a different variety of soup. The colors, though so commonly seen, seemed to pop out with such vibrance. The image as a whole made me wonder what it symbolized. Being around the 1960s when Warhol first introduced this theme it made me ask myself why? Was he expressing the unwanted coming of mass produced commercial items? Or the overwhelming picture of brand names? I really had no idea. Just then the audio tour guide explained that Warhol decided to use soup cans to avoid competing with more refined styles of comics. An abstraction, in a way, developed from the repeated images. Moving along through the divided rectangular room a large circular protracted image entitled Sinjerli I by Frank Stella was mounted on the wall. Its amazing the perfection that the piece had even though it was so large. My brilliant friend that went with me pointed out that the pencil marks were still visible down the middle. This struck me because it made it so real. I felt like I had a real connection with the artist, and could just see him at work in my mind. One of my favorites was the alphabet distorted and shaped into a popsicle with a bite taken out of it and a drip melting off the bottom. It was so creative and made me laugh. It was like the intestines of a someone stomach shaped into a tasty summer treat!