The late Tom Wesselmann was one of the big players of pop art – both in terms of his status, especially in America, where his lush depictions of consumer goods struck an iconic chord during the '60s and '70s; and also in terms of the gigantic size of his most famous paintings, whose imagery overwhelms you with its sheer, gaudy immensity. This exhibition, though, isn’t really about Wesselmann’s large-scale works – there are only three of them on display, segregated in an upstairs room. Instead, the main galleries focus on his small beginnings – tiny pieces which date from the late '50s when he was still a student, working without a proper studio in a cramped New York apartment.
As if to emphasise this idea of art made on a budget, the works themselves are all collages, assembled on the cheap from found materials. Scraps of patterned wrapping paper, dried leaves, cutouts from magazines – together, the components make up a domestic space, a miniature scene of wallpapered walls and trees glimpsed through windows, while a female figure occupies the foreground. In each case, she’s the only hand-drawn element, a flattened form done in scribbly pencil and pastel – so that, while the scenes may be charming and winsome on one level, they also have a slightly sinister edge, a feeling of people somehow occupying a different, ghostly reality from the surrounding world.
In collages from the early '60s, you can see Wesselmann moving into the sorts of still lifes of consumer items that came to dominate his later, more grandiose works. But it also alerts you to his rather unreconstructed take on subject-matter: basically, he depicts women and other objects. But don’t let that put you off too much. In purely formal terms, the way his collages play with different patterns and shapes, is tremendously compelling.