Isabel Oliver
Spanish Painter and Conceptual Artist
Movements and Styles: Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Feminist Art, Modern Photography
Born: 1946 - Valencia, Spain
"I was firmly convinced of how important it was to do this kind of [Pop Art] work, but I was also well aware that as a woman I would encounter additional obstacles."
Summary of Isabel Oliver
Isabel Oliver Cuevas was rediscovered in 2015 for her Spanish Pop art work, included in the exhibition The World Goes Pop at the Tate Modern in London, England. Oliver is associated with Spanish pop through her collaboration with the artist collective Equipo Crónica (Chronicle Team), founded in Valencia in 1964 by Rafael Solbes, Manuel (Manolo) Valdés (1942), and Joan Antoni Toledo. They invited Oliver to join them in 1971, when Pop art and the so-called New Figuration was influencing the work of the group.
Oliver collaborated with the Team for four years and, around the same time, she produced the important The Woman series from 1970 to 1973. Through this series Oliver examined popular culture in relation to images of women during the last decade of Franco's regime. Representative of a younger generation of women with feminist attitudes in the seventies, she overtly expressed her political views, taking advantage of Pop art's effects and strategies. Oliver analyzed and criticized the discriminatory situation of Spanish women under Franco's dictatorship, the very political situation in which she was living and of which she was a part.
While the majority of the focus regarding Pop art has centered on American and British artists, the Spanish artist Isabel Oliver provides a good example of one of the many less recognized artists around the world who appropriated Pop art strategies and effects. Additionally, she demonstrates how artists moved beyond their critique of popular culture and sought a deeper understanding of the everyday through an archaeological examination of materials and their traces.
Key Ideas
Isabel Oliver Artist Overview Page:
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Important Art by Isabel Oliver | |
 Artwork Images | Happy Reunion (1970-73)Artwork description & Analysis: Happy Reunion focuses on a group of eleven women sitting in a living room, who laugh and converse with each other. Behind them, a transparent wall reveals surreal scenes taking place in the outside world. The same scene appears in the window to the right of the canvas. While the women are painted in muted tones, the exterior scenes are depicted in vivid and bright colors, featuring a giraffe on fire with flames burning out from its back and neck; a lake, green hills, yellow sand, and white abstract forms resembling horses. In the left corner of the foreground, a red-cloaked skeletal form appears with flowing blond hair and three hands, two skeletal and one made of flesh holding an old-fashioned hourglass that shows that time has run out. Acrylic paint on canvas - Collection of the artist |
 Artwork Images | Self-portrait of the Artist (1970s)Artwork description & Analysis: Oliver positions her self-portrait in contrast her work Happy Reunion taken from a popular magazine. Both images of artist and middle-class women are in the same black and white tones, suggesting they were produced for the same mass media. Yet, the distance between the two images suggests a temporal difference, between present (receding into the past) and the potential future, which the artist represents. - Collection of the artist |
 Artwork Images | Beauty Products (1970-73)Artwork description & Analysis: In Beauty Products, a woman with short dark hair and gray-toned skin, dressed in a pale pink long sleeve jumpsuit stands with one arm raised above her head in an arcing gesture while the other, bent at the elbow, is extended straight out from the shoulder. In her hands she holds a pink colored scarf which flows in an elaborate swirling gesture behind her. Set against a white and yellow vertical striped background, she towers above a ground filled with brightly colored beauty products, such as face powders, perfumes, soaps, and bottles of nail polish. Acrylic paint on canvas - Collection of the artist |
More Isabel Oliver Artwork and Analysis:
Content compiled and written by Jessica DiPalma
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Jessica DiPalma
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 15 Sep 2017. Updated and modified regularly. 
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