A native to Philadelphia and a leader of the contemporary American Pop Art movement, Stango builds upon traditional Pop Art imagery while incorporating influential contemporary brands and uniquely American icons, such as Madonna, Muhammed Ali, Superman, and Clint Eastwood, while creating bold, colorful, and dynamic pieces that resonate with twentieth and twenty-first century pop culture energy. His family’s artistic heritage, which traces back to famed American artist Norman Rockwell, influenced Stango’s unique talent. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and graphic design, Stango soon began to create original silk-screened works. As his reputation as a fine artist and Pop Art innovator grew, he devoted his career to painting. Stango’s paintings draw a diverse crowd of collectors including Nicole Miller, Bruce Willis, Governor Ed Rendell, Swizz Beatz and Alan Iverson. Stango also remains deeply committed to philanthropy, using his paintings and proceeds to benefit charities around the world.
Post Modernism’s Pop Art movement emerged in the United States in the late-1950s as a way to challenge pre-existing traditions in fine art. It marked a return to hard-edged composition and representational art as a response by artists using impersonal, mundane reality, and irony to defuse the personal symbolism in Abstract Expressionism. Essentially, Pop Art and Post Modernism as a whole was developed to take the seriousness out of fine art that had evolved over time.Imagery from pop culture, such as advertising, comic books, fashion designers, and mundane objects, is often visually removed from its known context and combined with unrelated material. Perhaps some of the most iconic mid-twentieth century Pop Art works of art can be attributed to Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” or Roy Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl.” Overall, the concept of Pop Art refers more to the attitudes toward the imagery presented rather than the art itself.
Today, the modern American Pop Art Movement thrives through artists like John Stango. He paints in the vein of artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein while including modern subjects from newspapers, advertising, B-movies, mid-century modernism, magazines, fashion, noir films, vintage signage and pop-culture icons into his works, thus mixing a sense of nostalgia of Pop Art origins in the 1950s and 60s with 21st century cultural adaptations.