There’s not an Australian city more fitting to debut a blockbuster exhibition of Pop Art than one known as The Glitter Strip.

Opening this weekend at the Gold Coast’s new major public gallery HOTA (Home of the Arts) is Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection, New York. The show features 54 significant works that have never been exhibited before in Australia by the legendary Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann, alongside contemporary greats Katherine Bernhardt, Kwesi Botchway, George Condo, Damien Hirst, KAWS, Joel Mesler, Richard Prince, Tom Sachs, Julian Schnabel, and Mickalene Thomas. Curated exclusively from one of the empire state’s largest private collections owned by Jose Mugrabi—who is allegedly the largest Warhol collector in the world with over 800 of his works in his possession—Pop Masters is about as New York art world as it gets. 

Arriving at the Gold Coast is not unlike stepping into the kitsch, hedonistic pages of a holiday brochure. The sun bears down on the beaches, the sacred Nerang River and the majestic green mountain ranges. The windows of high rises and hotels shimmer. Bronzed bodies wear large sunglasses and sunhats (and tiny pants). My driver tells us she had Guns ‘n’ Roses in the back last week; tomorrow, it’ll be Ed Sheeran (I tell her he used to put on his own music at house parties). She says there’s always a big name in town. As we approach HOTA, I note its multicolored geometric façade rising from the landscape in epic proportions. Unapologetically audacious, just like the city it occupies, HOTA is an ideal exhibition space for artists obsessed with the celebrity and glamour of the New York art scene. 

Six years in the making, Pop Masters was always intended to be a statement. ‘The concept really started in 2016. We were looking towards building the gallery,’ says HOTA’s Gallery Director and driver of the show, Tracy Cooper-Lavery. ‘Right from the start, our ambition was to accommodate international shows of a scale that you would see on a state level,’ After getting in touch with Mugrabi and sitting down with his lawyers to discuss the finer details of the show—as New Yorker’s do—the remainder of the exhibition was curated digitally during the pandemic. ‘Their collection was just so vast. We’ve never had full access to the collection, we curated it specifically for the Gold Coast from a longlist. Right from the start, we knew we didn’t want the show to feel as if it was based in the 1960s, we wanted to bring pop art into the 2020s. That’s been key in the selection of the contemporary pieces.’

Walking into Pop Masters, the first works you encounter are by Richard Prince and Tom Wesselmann. ‘I’m excited to open the show with this unique pairing of works: Wesselmann as one of the godfathers of Pop Art, then to put Richard Prince and those Instagram portraits beside them, it feels a bit wild,’ shares Co-Curator Bradley Vincent, ‘They both represent very American approaches to portraiture, they’re both uniquely of their time and have the same pop spirit. Visually, they’re dissimilar, but conceptually are doing similar things—which is something that happens in the show a lot.’

To the right, a trio of iconic portraits by Andy Warhol cements the show as a crash course in American history: Mao (1973), Dolly Parton (1975), and Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli (1978). Across the room, a grouping of Warhol’s polaroid portraits of his subjects offers a moment of intimacy and reveals a vital element of the artist’s creative process.

Traveling further into the show, the scale of the space becomes apparent. High ceilings and expansive rooms of the ground floor gallery have allowed large-scale paintings to come to the fore, one being Keith Haring vibrant dancing dogs ‘Untitled’ (1979). ‘What I love about the show and this space is that we get to custom build for every exhibition. Everything looks its best and is made to hold and venerate that work. Standing at the altar of Keith Haring? Yes, please. And having Warhol’s portrait of Haring as a precursor to seeing his works feels really special.’ 

Turning in the gallery, I behold another impactful painting: Katherine Bernhardt’s Giant Jungle Office (2017), which, being over six meters wide, had to be stretched in the gallery itself. Its lively composition of random everyday objects like toothpaste, Windex and bananas hum in neon pink spray paint. ‘Artists aren’t always replicating each other visually, but they all exist in the same pop universe, which is the same consumer universe, the same capitalist universe, which means by exploring those realms, inevitably, they will talk to each other in interesting ways,’ shares Bradley.

Rounding a corner, viewers enter the world of Basquiat featuring pieces such as an early streetscape from his first gallery-based solo exhibition New York, New York (1981) and Untitled (Football Helmet), (1981-84), which the artist famously loaned to Warhol with instructions to wear it for 24 hours so he could understand how it felt to be observed as a Black man in America.

Bradley jokes that the show was ‘curated within an inch of its life’, and it shows. Generous yet sparse enough to allow moments of contemplation and the opportunity to sit and marinate with works one-on-one, the shiny, witty story being told here has the capacity to resonate with visitors on a level that feels personal and intentional.