Andy Warhol once famously stated, “Pop art is for everyone.”
To live up to this mantra, promote art and make his pop art accessible to all, Portugease studio LIKEarchitects set up a miniature pop-up museum within a shopping mall.
The temporary Andy Warhol museum in Colombo Shopping Mall, Lisbon, contained 32 original artworks by the late American artist.
Instead of keeping to the typical white walls of gallery spaces, the architects opted for a medium that tied in some of Warhol’s most iconic paintings—the temporary museum was constructed using 1,500 aluminum cylindrical cans, reminiscent of the artist’s renown Campbell’s Soup Cans.
Through the use of the cans, like Andy Warhol’s works, the museum aimed to reflect consumer society in a literal manner.
“Campbell’s Soup Cans is a well-known artwork that is based on the idea of sublimating everyday objects, regardless of their original function, and transforming them into tangible icons of collective imaginary,” Diogo Aguiar, architect at LIKEarchitects, told Dezeen. “This premise by the artist was very important to our conception phase, when we had the idea of constructing a museum using familiar components, more specifically cylindrical cans.”
Visitors of the mall could stroll through the rooms of the pop-up museum freely.
[via Dezeen, images via Fernando Guerra]