Pop-ism Brings 60 Years of Pop Art to London, Then Zurich
Sixty years of bright colour and everyday objects are taking over a gallery in London this week.
Swiss dealer Galerie von Vertes is opening “Pop-ism”, a selling survey of Pop art, in London before travelling to Zurich. The London preview is timed to PAD London, the art and design fair that runs 13 to 18 October. After its first week, the show moves to Switzerland and continues through 4 December, according to Artnet News.
Pop art, the postwar movement that borrowed images from advertising, comics and supermarket shelves, holds the whole thing together. The selection runs from 1946 to 2008. That is more than six decades in one place.
The roll call will look familiar even if you never follow galleries. It includes Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana and John Chamberlain. Together they trace Pop from its early experiments to its later echoes.
Two works show how wide that story gets. Claes Oldenburg’s Tea Bag dates to 1966, a soft take on a throwaway household thing. John Chamberlain’s Potatopoultry dates to 2008 and is made from crushed and welded automobile scrap metal. One is playful. The other is heavy, bent and gleaming.
The checklist stretches further. Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger and Yayoi Kusama are also featured. Their inclusion pulls the show beyond the best-known American names and back toward European roots and later global links.
London visitors get a busy week for it. PAD London 2026 takes place at Berkeley Square in London, features more than 60 exhibitors and holds its VIP opening on 14 October. The overlap puts the gallery display within easy reach of fair crowds already in the city.
There is wider context across the Atlantic too. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is running a Pop retrospective on view through January 2027. The London and Zurich outing lands while that larger museum story is still running.
What makes this stand out for a casual visit is scale without homework. You can walk in, spot a Warhol or a Haring, then find the stranger corners. No background needed.
For anyone planning to go, a little planning helps. The gallery says exhibitions are open by appointment, with office hours from 9am to 5pm, according to its website Galerie von Vertes. Its Zurich gallery is at Bahnhofstrasse 16, 8001 Zurich in Switzerland. The gallery lists the Switzerland run of POP-ISM as 13 October to 4 December 2026.
