Kathleen Keifer is a California based internationally collected artist. She is a leading force of New California Realism. With a high level of technical virtuosity, Keifer creates a new sense of reality with textures and colors that seem to add lighting effects and distinct shadows, confronting the viewer with new interpretations of familiar objects. Keifer’s paintings invite the viewer to consider the complex relationship between time and timelessness. It is the sheer visual interaction between the elements, taken in their bare simplicity that interests her. For her, the painting captures the very essence of time and its passage. She believes that actual sites and places have individual magic. The goal is to take objects from popular culture and paint them in a new narrative context. Her complex approaches to popular board games present the subjects as living, tangible objects. Keifer’s interest took her to paint bits and pieces of board games. Her husband had been designing and inventing board games for thirty years and her homes and studios are filled with games and playing pieces. She is fascinated with the response these board games (and bits and pieces) evoke in us as adults. Sure there's the tug of childhood and nostalgia, the innocence of playing a game with clear rules and clear winners. But somehow these board games live in an unconscious dream-realm where they represent something more than the detritus of playtime. All the while she is painting them in the context of living in Los Angeles, a cultural capital filled with pop art and pop culture. Born and raised in Chicago, Kathleen Keifer is a second-generation artist. Her mother, also a fine artist, exposed Keifer to the world of art and supervised her training from a very early age. This legacy continues today as Keifer closely nurtures the development of the artistic leaning in each of her three daughters, inspiring a third generation of female artists. Her works are represented by Artspace Warehouse, Los Angeles and have been exhibited and collected internationally, including Chicago, New York and London.

A Close Look at Pop Art Art

Perhaps one of the most influential contemporary art movements, Pop art emerged in the 1950s. In stark contrast to traditional artistic practice, its practitioners drew on imagery from popular culture — comic books, advertising, product packaging and other commercial media — to create original Pop art paintings, prints and sculptures that celebrated ordinary life in the most literal way.

ORIGINS OF POP ART

Started in Britain in the 1950s, flourished in 1960s-era America
“This is Tomorrow,” at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, was reportedly the first Pop art exhibition
A reaction to postwar mass consumerism
Transitioning away from Abstract Expressionism
Informed by neo-Dada and artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; influenced postmodernism and Photorealism

CHARACTERISTICS OF POP ART

Bold imagery
Bright, vivid colors
Straightforward concepts
Engagement with popular culture
Incorporation of everyday objects from advertisements, cartoons, comic books and other popular mass media

POP ARTISTS TO KNOW

ORIGINAL POP ART ON 1STDIBS

The Pop art movement started in the United Kingdom as a reaction, both positive and critical, to the period’s consumerism. Its goal was to put popular culture on the same level as so-called high culture.

Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? is widely believed to have kickstarted this unconventional new style.

Pop art works are distinguished by their bold imagery, bright colors and seemingly commonplace subject matter. Practitioners sought to challenge the status quo, breaking with the perceived elitism of the previously dominant Abstract Expressionism and making statements about current events. Other key characteristics of Pop art include appropriation of imagery and techniques from popular and commercial culture; use of different media and formats; repetition in imagery and iconography; incorporation of mundane objects from advertisements, cartoons and other popular media; hard edges; and ironic and witty treatment of subject matter.

Although British artists launched the movement, they were soon overshadowed by their American counterparts. Pop art is perhaps most closely identified with American Pop artist Andy Warhol, whose clever appropriation of motifs and images helped to transform the artistic style into a lifestyle. Most of the best-known American artists associated with Pop art started in commercial art (Warhol made whimsical drawings as a hobby during his early years as a commercial illustrator), a background that helped them in merging high and popular culture.

Roy Lichtenstein was another prominent Pop artist that was active in the United States. Much like Warhol, Lichtenstein drew his subjects from print media, particularly comic strips, producing paintings and sculptures characterized by primary colors, bold outlines and halftone dots, elements appropriated from commercial printing. Recontextualizing a lowbrow image by importing it into a fine-art context was a trademark of his style. Neo-Pop artists like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami further blurred the line between art and popular culture.

Pop art rose to prominence largely through the work of a handful of men creating works that were unemotional and distanced — in other words, stereotypically masculine. However, there were many important female Pop artists, such as Rosalyn Drexler, whose significant contributions to the movement are recognized today. Best known for her work as a playwright and novelist, Drexler also created paintings and collages embodying Pop art themes and stylistic features.

Read more about the history of Pop art and the style’s famous artists, and browse the collection of original Pop art paintings, prints, photography and other works for sale on 1stDibs.

Finding the Right figurative-paintings for You

Figurative art, as opposed to abstract art, retains features from the observable world in its representational depictions of subject matter. Most commonly, figurative paintings reference and explore the human body, but they can also include landscapes, architecture, plants and animals — all portrayed with realism.

While the oldest figurative art dates back tens of thousands of years to cave wall paintings, figurative works made from observation became especially prominent in the early Renaissance. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance masters created naturalistic representations of their subjects.

Pablo Picasso is lauded for laying the foundation for modern figurative art in the 1920s. Although abstracted, this work held a strong connection to representing people and other subjects. Other famous figurative artists include Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Figurative art in the 20th century would span such diverse genres as Expressionism, Pop art and Surrealism.

Today, a number of figural artists — such as Sedrick Huckaby, Daisy Patton and Eileen Cooper — are making art that uses the human body as its subject.

Because figurative art represents subjects from the real world, natural colors are common in these paintings. A piece of figurative art can be an exciting starting point for setting a tone and creating a color palette in a room.

Browse an extensive collection of figurative paintings on 1stDibs.