SUMMER OF LOVE
2. November - 12. February 2006

Psychedelia is one of the most interesting but also most neglected phenomena of the cultural history of the twentieth century. “Summer of Love” highlights the unparalleled connection between contemporary art and popular culture, the advertising culture and the pictorial language of the political protests of the 1960s and early 1970s for the first time. This dialogue found expression in a unique aesthetics that expressed social, political, ethnic, and sexual liberation as well as consciousness-expanding experiences through experiments with LSD. Works by Andy Warhol and Yayoi Kusama, spatial utopias by Verner Panton, as well as music videos by the Velvet Underground, concert recordings of Deep Purple, and a program of experimental films and the Hollywood productions they influenced. The exhibition reveals the creative and utopian potential of psychedelic art in all its urgency and demonstrates how profoundly it affected quotidian culture.

Curator: Christoph Grunenberg, Tate Liverpool

In advance of the exhibition Summer of Love. Art of the Psychedelic Era the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, in cooperation with the Galeria Kaufhof, Frankfurt, is presenting a large-scale work by Yayoi Kusama on the facade and in the display windows of the Galeria Kaufhof on Frankfurt’s Hauptwache (Until 7 November). Yayoi Kusama is one of Japan’s most versatile and successful artists internationally. She has caused a sensation since the 1960s with her installations and objects with bright dots. The artist, who became known in Europe as the Polka Dot Princess, covers her world with colorful dots: whole rooms, furniture, and people dissolve in a whirl of polka dots.