GENERAL IDEA "COPYRIGHT" PAINTING, 1986

Formed in Toronto in 1967, General Idea would spend the next 30 years making a remarkable contribution to post-modern art. Their body of work combines both provocative and banal imagery with wit, irony and camp, creating subversive cultural critiques on a wide range of topics.

The theme of consumerism is explored throughout their oeuvre, used to confront the reality that art had traditionally been a luxury item, a social flex, and a commodity. Founding member AA Bronson once explained, “General Idea was at once complicit in and critical of the mechanisms and strategies that join art and commerce, a sort of mole in the art world.”

This work, a paradigm of their iconic Copyright series, features an enlarged symbol that encompasses the composition. The stretched denim is beached with a tie-dye effect that ripples around the symbol. These paintings appropriated the international symbol of legal ownership and turned it into an oversized abstract logo, and became the ideal version of abstraction in the post-modern era.