This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Isabel Oliver.
Born: 1946, Spain
Died: NA
Country most active: Spain
Also known as: Isabel Oliver Cuevas
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.
Accomplishments
By manipulating mass media images, in particular from magazines, Oliver critically appropriated history and art, juxtaposed reality and societal norms, individuality and family as well as addressed stereotypes of women propagated in popular culture. These popular images allowed her to comment on the superficial normalcy that women complied with in their daily lives.
Working on an overarching theme, such as The Woman, in a series of images allowed Oliver to represent various aspects of a women’s societal, familial, and stereotypical portrayals. Seriality also mimicked the multiplicity of images generated by the mass media, and how images were repeated across different formats from magazines to television.
By the 1990s, Oliver had left “pop” behind and engaged with the concept of time. Using new materials and new everyday objects, she excavated the layers of past and present forms of human creativity, while contemplating the future.