This presentation features works in the UBS Art Collection by artists—representing different generations, geographies and art movements—who find inspiration in quotidian objects and materials, bridging the gap between fine art and popular culture. While traditional art often draws from figures, history or landscapes, these artists explore commonplace or commercial items, infusing new meaning into their chosen mediums and materials. They elevate these objects for different purposes—to evoke nostalgia or familiarity, reflect personal and collective identities or examine consumerism through mass produced imagery, transforming the ordinary into impactful works of art.
Farah Al Qasimi works with photography, video and performance. She spent her formative years in Abu Dhabi and divides her time between New York and Dubai. Her photography captures scenes of everyday life that reflect economic and social developments in the UAE and the influence of Western culture and consumerism.
In 'Perfume (Men, Women),' 2019, Al Qasimi invites the viewer into an intimate candy-colored space, referencing, but not revealing its occupant. The pristine bathroom is adorned with two perfume bottles and other toiletries, which are reflected in the mirror, implying multiple perspectives. Except for the tissue box, branded with writing in Arabic, the bathroom could just as easily be situated in a home in the Western world. Perfume and genders roles are subjects that Al Qasimi has explored – creating a film about the perfume factories of Sharjah and developing scents made by a perfume company’s most popular fragrances for men and women.
Katherine Bernhardt is known for her colorful paintings that feature her singular visual lexicon of motifs taken from pop culture as well as her own life. ‘Untitled’ (2024) features Cookie Monster, the ‘Sesame Street’ character. In lieu of cookies, his wide-open mouth reveals other treats—the colorful marshmallow shapes in Lucky Charms cereal.
The work pays playful homage to the fifteenth-century Bolognini Chapel fresco ‘Inferno’ (c. 1410) by Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni da Modena. In one of the panels, a blue-haired beast devours a screaming human while surrounded by gruesome scenes. Bernhardt reimagines this grotesque hellmouth in a joyful painting in which a much more sympathetic monster is rendered in a bright, high-contrast palette that recalls mass-market food advertising.
Anne Collier's interest in mass-market and pop culture imagery from the 1960s through the 1980s is reflected in her carefully staged photographs. She combines still-life photography with techniques of appropriation, using diverse sources ranging from advertisements and posters to art magazines and LP covers.
Collier's 'Crying (Comic)' series is based on images from covers of vintage romance comics. The clichéd stories contained within these novels portray suffering female protagonists with trivialized emotions. Collier’s dramatically cropped and pixelated images of women crying recall Roy Lichtenstein's similarly graphic depictions of women with tearful expressions. Like Lichtenstein, who is known for using elements of commercial advertising and comics in his works, Collier removes the original narrative context.
Jose Dávila’s photographic work and installations reflect on twentieth-century art and pay homage to seminal figures in American Minimalism and European abstraction. Dávila explores how these tendencies have been interpreted and appropriated over time to open new discourses. In his cutouts, Dávila manually extracts the central image from photographs of iconic artworks and renowned monuments. By introducing these white voids, where negative space becomes the focus, he creates a three-dimensionality akin to his sculptural work and comments on the relationship between subject and context.
‘Untitled (Interior with Mirror)’ (2019) is from a series that references Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings. In these photographs, Dávila deconstructs Lichtenstein’s signature portraits, brushstrokes and interiors. He plays with the idea of appropriation, an essential component of Lichtenstein’s practice. Inspired by advertisements and comic books, Lichtenstein developed his distinctive technique of using Ben-Day dots in his series of interiors to define the room, delineate the furniture and create the illusion of space. Two works from this series are in the UBS Art Collection.
Before becoming an artist, Gabriel de la Mora trained and practiced as an architect. After several years, he changed course and focused instead on visual art. During his studies, de la Mora began the practice of collecting found objects such as paint chips, matchboxes, photographs and leather shoe soles. He repurposes these materials, referring to their original uses while at the same time investigating conceptual art practices.
De la Mora’s works explore the transformative powers of his materials and the mutable nature of perception. ‘6,286 from the series “In Between What I Reflect and What I See,”’ 2024, is derived from a previous series in which the artist created geometric compositions using fragments of eggshells from various animal species. This work consists of 6,286 convex and concave fragments from blown glass and aluminum spheres typically used as Christmas ornaments. These mirrored surfaces reflect shifting images of the viewer and the surrounding environment, creating unpredictable and distorted visual experiences.
Sylvie Fleury’s work fuses high art and popular culture. By delving into the tradition of the readymade and borrowing elements from Pop art and Minimalism, Fleury explores the gender codes of contemporary consumerism and questions existing structures of power and desire.
‘Soleil Exotica’ (2018) is part of a series of paintings that reimagines the familiar forms of makeup sets produced by high-end brands, bearing the enticing and seductive titles of the cosmetic products to which they refer. Created out of shaped canvases pieced together with exacting craftsmanship, the works recall an artist’s paint palette and explore the fetish-laden connotations infused within consumer items.
The Collection has been acquiring the artist's work since 1994 when she was commissioned to make two paintings for UBS's Basel offices.
Hong Hao focuses on aspects of social life in modern China, often making satirical comments on the country’s prosperity and its relations with the West. In a series of digitally manipulated photographs titled ‘My Things,’ which he began in 2001, the artist examines production and consumption in China’s contemporary consumer society.
Since 2001, Hong has collected objects, scanning them and organizing the digital files in his massive visual archive. He composes photographic collages from the scanned objects, which appear as both abstract compositions and representations of the everyday habits, tastes and needs of an ordinary person.
Steph Huang, a Taiwanese artist based in London, explores the poetic and emotional dimensions of everyday life in her practice. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, she assembles mass-produced and organic materials, creating layered narratives that reflect on consumerism, memory and human relationships. Huang transforms these mundane remnants into tactile encounters that critique and question the disposability and efficiency of modern consumer culture.
‘Luncheon’ (2024) and ‘Holiday Treats’ (2025) are two of several sculptural works that comprised ‘Lili Deli,’ a fictional store installation exhibited at the Taipei Fine Art Museum in 2025. Built on pressed wastepaper cubes, the installation replaced conventional materials with fragile, organic and impermanent ones — rust-prone steel, bronze fish bones, oxidizing shellfish, fading thermal paper and recycled packaging. ‘Luncheon’ features a precariously balanced composition of mild steel, emulsion, wood, glass, tin and bronze, evoking the fleeting nature of consumption and the fragility of memory. ‘Holiday Treats’ extends this meditation by pairing playful, sweets themed forms with similarly fragile materials, highlighting how moments of pleasure are entwined with cycles of waste and impermanence.
Roy Lichtenstein has produced some of the most enduringly iconic Pop images of the twentieth century. He gained experience as a draftsman in the US army, drawing maps and enlarging cartoons for the army newspaper ‘Stars and Stripes.’ Much influenced by the work of the European avant-garde he saw during the war, Lichtenstein was nonetheless drawn to images of Americana and cartoons evident in his first non-expressionistic work ‘Look Mickey’ (1961), based on pictures found in one of his children's books and containing his first dialogue balloon. At this time, Lichtenstein also developed his signature technique of reproducing Ben-Day dots, which he first created by applying oil paint onto a plastic-bristle dog-grooming brush and pressing it onto the canvas, later using a stencil technique that involved rolling paint across a handmade metal screen.
Lichtenstein began his ‘Interior’ series in 1990, including ‘Interior with Red Wall (Study)’ (1991) inspired by interiors in comics, the Yellow Pages and newspaper ads. The living room depicted is host to a mixture of generic modernist furniture and assorted works of art.
One of the world's most acclaimed Pop Artist, Roy Lichtenstein, focused on the relationship between "high" visual culture and the popular "low" culture of the masses. Much influenced by the work of the European avant-garde, Lichtenstein was nonetheless drawn to images of Americana and cartoons evident in his first non-expressionistic work ‘Look Mickey’ (1961), based on pictures found in one of his children's books and containing his first dialogue balloon. At this time, Lichtenstein also developed his signature technique of reproducing Ben-Day dots. Lichtenstein used the graphic methods of cartoons and comic strips, transposing them to painting in playfully ironic images.
Lichtenstein created numerous works with close-up pictures of young American beauties drawn from cartoons during the 1960s, exaggerating his technique to explore the clichés of comic strips. ‘The Melody Haunts My Reverie’ (1965), forms part of a series of women inspired by DC Comics’ ‘Girls' Romances’ and ‘Secret Hearts,’ in contrast to his earlier paintings based on All-American Men of War comics like ‘Blam,’ ‘Takka Takka,’ and ‘Live Ammo.’
The Luo Brothers’ work juxtaposes icons from Chinese communism with mass-market consumerism, building on a critical approach to the new China begun in the 1990s by exponents of what Li Xianting termed ‘Political Pop’ or ‘Cynical Realism.’ Born just after the Cultural Revolution, the three brothers were each given patriotic, revolutionary names: Luo Weidong (defender of the Orient), Luo Weiguo (defender of the country) and Luo Weibing (defender of the body).
The brother’s work reflects on the huge changes that have taken place in China in their lifetimes, where red advertisements for Coca-Cola have become as ubiquitous as the red, national flag. They employ traditional craft making techniques of lacquer paint on wood and ink on paper to create eye-popping, psychedelic designs that replace the conventional Chinese system of alternating empty space and form with an obsessive excess of imagery. With a few notable exceptions, all their work is subsumed under the series title ‘Welcome to the Worldwide Famous Brands’ (2004), the foreign brands of Heineken, Pepsi, 7-Up as and Coca-Cola taking the place of political slogans. The Luo Brothers leave a level of ambiguity over the extent to which the work is a celebration or critique of the emergence of a new consumer culture, and of the changing political system from China’s Cultural Revolution to its recent industrialization and entry into the global marketplace.
Beijing artist Ma Qiusha’s practice includes videos, installations and photographs that are often social and cultural as well as autobiographical in nature. Begun in 2014, the works in the ‘Wonderland’ series consist of cement fragments and nylon stockings. The shattered concrete recalls the rapid urban development in Beijing in the 1990s, when demolition and construction were constant. The artist collected vintage nylon stockings from the 1980s and 1990s that were made available after the Chinese market was open to the world. The stockings also symbolize the shift of women’s role in society and changing ideas of femininity. Ma uses clear nail polish to patch the snags and tears in the stockings—a practice she learned from her mother to preserve them in the time prior to overproduction, consumerism and disposability.
Since the early 1960s, Claes Oldenburg has been associated with the Pop art movement. He has made sculptures, collages, drawings and prints of familiar objects that are whimsical and insightful reflections on the culture of consumption. One of Oldenburg’s most well-known creations was ‘The Store,’ which he opened in an empty commercial space in New York’s Lower East Side in 1961. He displayed painted plaster and enamel replicas of the cheap goods found in neighborhood stores.
Oldenburg continued to introduce other unexpected elements in his works throughout the 1960s, playing with ideas of scale, material and context. He made his first multiples, limited edition sculptures produced in series, in 1964 when he moved to Venice, California. He viewed the multiple as the sculptor’s version of a print and appreciated the irony of mass-producing reproductions of mass-produced objects. In ‘Tilting Neon Cocktail’ (1983), Oldenburg transformed the familiar bar sign icon into a stainless steel sculpture on a plinth.
Hilary Pecis’s vivid paintings, drawings and prints challenge the traditional genres of still life and landscape. She manipulates perspectives, exaggerates colors and combines busy patterns. Pecis is inspired by the exterior and interior spaces that are part of her daily life. Her works are based on photographs that she shoots on her mobile phone while on outings in her Los Angeles neighborhood or while traveling. She uses these images as guidelines but takes substantial liberties, meticulously arranging compositional elements.
The subject of ‘Bakery Display’ (2025) is a display case in Greenpoint, Brooklyn featuring groupings of tantalizing desserts. These enticing confections include colorful fruit tarts, flan soaked in caramel sauce and black forest cake slices adorned with whipped cream and cherries, all carefully arranged to create a seductive pattern. The work pays homage to the delicacies depicted by Wayne Thiebaud, another California painter who documented everyday American life. Raised in Northern California, Pecis learned about art from her mother’s calendars, which highlighted regional artists such as Thiebaud. Unlike Thiebaud’s desserts, typically set in anonymous, cream-colored spaces, Pecis delights in contextual details—the ventilation slits in the display cooler, for instance, form a rhythmic line across the bottom of the composition.
The work of iconic American artist Ed Ruscha is represented in depth in the UBS Art Collection with 56 paintings, works on paper and prints that span the first four decades of his career and include some of his most seminal images.
Ruscha's oeuvre is not easily confined to any one category. With his deadpan, West Coast attitude and wry sense of humor, Ruscha adds a more conceptual edge to Pop art. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, words and phrases have played a central role in his practice. References to trademarks and packaging, exploration of fonts and typography, as well as the use of oblique perspectives and flat, commercial style are evidence of his early training as a layout artist in the advertising industry.
The tiny ‘Spam Study’ (1961-62) may be the smallest painting he ever produced. It is the study for a larger work, ‘Actual Size’ (1962), now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The study is meant to be the exact size of a can of Spam, a precooked canned meat that was introduced to American consumers in the 1930s and soon became a household name. Ruscha lived off Spam for months as a young artist.
Wayne Thiebaud was an early proponent of Pop art’s fascination with mass culture. His paintings of cakes, pies, candy, gumball machines and deli counters were first exhibited in New York in 1961.
The counter in ‘Desserts’ (1961) is loaded with a seemingly endless display of seductive confections. The inspiration stems from Thiebaud’s youthful experience working in a restaurant during the Great Depression and noticing how items on a counter were lit. Thiebaud’s paintings consistently include shadows and reflect his experimentation with direct and diffuse lighting. The artist’s style—thick paint, bright colors, monochrome backgrounds and sharp contours—was influenced by his early career as a cartoonist for the Army, and also briefly in Disney’s animation department and later as a commercial artist in Los Angeles. The cartoonish sentimentality is underscored by a rigid study of objects that continues an art historical lineage of still-life painting.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s practice defies easy categorization. He combines traditional object-making with performance, teaching and public intervention to explore the role of an artist in society. He is widely recognized for his work that focuses on the cultural impact of communal cooking and eating. In one of his best-known series, he prepared and served Southeast Asian food for gallery visitors.
‘untitled 2019 (five easy pieces) (from the offering series)’ (2019) pays respect to the Japanese culture’s everyday craftsmanship and sweets makers. The work is produced by a Japanese craftsman whom Tiravanija cooked for in 2000 when he performed at a gallery in Tokyo. The artist’s visit to Japan inspired his transformation of plastic food samples into Japanese traditional sweets. The title refers to offerings commonly made by Thai people.
Andy Warhol collapsed boundaries between high and low culture, art and life. He began as a commercial artist, quickly gaining a reputation that led to high-profile clients. Warhol adapted commercial techniques and subject matter to create his own art and became a central figure in the Pop art movement. Like other Pop artists, he was influenced by the booming post-war consumer culture. He was also fascinated with fame. Warhol’s own celebrity status gained him access to the most important personalities of his era and he was obsessed with documenting his every encounter in writing, audio recordings and films.
Warhols’s depictions of mass-produced items like Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans became cultural icons. The Campbell’s brand, with its familiar red and white label, originated in the late nineteenth century. It gained widespread recognition throughout the twentieth century, especially following the surge in mass production and advertising after World War II. Warhol claimed that he consumed Campbell’s soup every day for 20 years. For him, it was the quintessential American product. He first showed the series ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’ in 1962. Canvases representing each of the 32 varieties then available were displayed on shelves as if in a grocery store.
By late 1962, Warhol adopted the photo-silkscreen or screenprint technique used to make ‘Campbell's Soup I’ (1968), a set of 10 soup cans. Originally developed for commercial purposes, this printmaking method became Warhol’s signature medium, aligning his artistic processes more closely with those of advertisements.
Zheng Guogu emerged in the 1990s as a conceptual artist. He uses ink, installation, photography, film and painting to explore topics relating to globalization and the development of the “New China,” which he witnessed growing up in a part of the country that was experiencing rapid economic growth due to industrialization.
‘Computer Controlled by Pig’s Brain 2014 No.2’ (2014) is from a series that Zheng began in the late 1990s, which features the text and graphics from mass media sources, including magazines in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Guangdong. These elements were digitally altered and printed as rubber relief characters that were then adhered to the canvas. He intentionally created the series without any traditional painting components.
Zheng’s work speaks to the strong influence and exchange of popular culture in these regions. Upon closer inspection, viewers familiar with local media may recognize many of the celebrity names from the early 2000s. The flashiness of the neon pigments that Zheng adopts further hints at the acceleration of commercialization and consumerism. The title, ‘Computer Controlled by Pig’s Brain,’ suggests the effects of the proliferation of banal contemporary signage, slogans and tabloids. Translated literally, the word for ‘computer’ in Chinese is ‘electric brain.’ The Cantonese insult ‘Human head, pig brain’ means a ‘foolish person.’