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Idelle Weber. Sunny - Works from New York’s Pop Era

Broadway 1602 Harlem, New York

Artist: Idelle Weber

Idelle Weber (b. 1932 in Chicago) is one of the most prolific and original female artists of New York’s Pop Art era.

A central figure in New York’s 1960s avant-garde circles, she was friends with most of the major female and male artists of the time such as Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Sylvia Sleigh, George Segal, to name a few. Like her female Pop Art peers Rosalyn Drexler, Marjorie Strider and Sylvia Sleigh in New York, – or Evelyne Axell and Paulina Boty abroad -, Idelle Weber not only contested in a proto-feminist fashion dominant gender representations of her time, but also created an alternative, even utopian realm of the female body often involved in extreme and liberating movement.

Weber’s central choice of iconography was absolutely unique in the field of Pop Art. She explored the American cosmopolitan milieu of the 1950s and1960s particularly targeting gender roles in corporate culture, mass media and politics. As her husband was a corporate lawyer in in New York’s iconic Lever Building, Weber frequently visited the Midtown offices making sketches, which majorly inspired a motif central in her work: ‘The Men in the Office’, black anonymous silhouettes representing prototypes in the 1950s male dominated work sphere, the metropolitan hallways of power. As it happened decades later, the trailer of cult TV series “Mad Men” was inspired by Weber’s genuine aesthetic. Weber’s timeless ‘cool’ and dandified style also sank into the 1980s aesthetic of e.g. “The Men in the City” series by Robert Longo.

Weber also deeply processed the trauma of the Vietnam War and the uprisings of the Civil Rights Movement in her work. The cultural and political underpinnings in Weber’s paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures are deeply imbedded in the 1960s era.

Idelle Weber was prominently presented at the Brooklyn Museum show “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists” in 2010. Recent prominent museums acquisitions include her iconic black plexi and neon sculpture “Woman with Jump Rope” (1964) at LACMA in Los Angeles, on view in the collection this Spring, and the “Lever Building” (1970) work on paper at the Whitney Museum in New York, also currently on view in the collection.

This March we are delighted to present Idelle Weber’s first solo exhibition in our Harlem gallery. A central piece on show will be Weber’s spectacular black plexi and mirror sculpture “Sunny” (1969) showing the silhouettes of a man and woman involved in intense conversation in front of a large wall of mirror tiles.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)

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