Women Artists and Pop Art in Catalonia in The 60s: Carme Aguadé, Silvia Gubern, Mari Chordà

Abstract

During the 1960s, some Catalan women artists came into contact with pop art. In this article we reconstruct fragments of the initial trajectories of three painters recently recognized in the history of the second avant-garde: Carme Aguadé, Silvia Gubern and Mari Chordà. We argue that pop aesthetic was used in their art works to create iconographies and debates on identity and sexual politics, before these themes were central to feminist art in the following decades. This proto-feminist reading has been obviated by the critical narratives that studied «political pop» in Spain. From feminist research on pop art and female artists, initiated by researcher Kalliopi Minioudaki (2010, 2015), we propose to recognize that, through the production of pop aesthetics in their work, these artists initiated processes of female self-awareness, explored their own identity as women and painters and raised their own artistic, political and spiritual ideas.