What is Popular Culture? Different kinds of culture reflect different theoretical bases for understanding, or criteria for evaluating, human activity. In general, the term culture denotes the whole product of an individual, group or society of intelligent beings. It includes technology, art, science, as well as moral systems and the characteristic behaviors and habits of the selected intelligent entities. In particular, it has specific more detailed meanings in different domains of human activities.

Liz Maw Mysterious Remains, 2006 oil on sheep skull courtesy the artist, private collection, Wellington and Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland

Anthropologists most commonly use the term culture to refer to the universal human capacity to classify, codify and communicate their experiences symbolically. This capacity has long been taken as a defining feature of humans.

People are categorized by themselves and by others along a variety of dimensions: according to race primarily by skin colour and other physical characteristics; according to social class, possessions, property and wealth. As well as according to ethnicity by their national origin or ancestry, and their own feelings of group membership.

It can also be said that culture is the way people live in accordance to beliefs, language, history, or the way they dress.

Popular culture, sometimes abbreviated to pop culture, consists of widespread cultural elements. Pop Art first appeared in Britain during the 1950s.

Of the few British artists who came to international prominence soon after the second world war, Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi (b. 1924-2005,Scotland) was one of the most inventive, prolific and various. Chiefly a sculptor (and one of the first to react against the all-pervading influence of Henry Moore), he was also a highly original printmaker, some of whose collage-based silk-screened images are among the finest examples of pop art - the style he was instrumental in shaping.

During the same period, Paolozzi also established a reputation abroad. His work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and then again in 1960 we saw a retrospective at the British Pavilion.

David Hockney Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970-1971 Acrylic on canvas Tate Gallery, London

Pop Art coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and '60s, and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London. While Peter Blake was designing album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placing film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures, Andy Warhol (b.1928 - 1987), was immortalizing Marilyn Monroe in the USA. Hockney's, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy was painted between 1970 and 1971. It depicts the fashion designer Ossie Clark and the textile designer Celia Birtwell shortly after their wedding at which Hockney was Clark's best man.

Hockney has drawn from The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (b.1385 - 1441 Netherlands) in the symbolism and composition of the painting. The couple are shown in an upstairs parlour. They are displaying the fashion in France and Burgundy by having a bed in the upstairs parlour for seating and especially for a mother with a new born, receiving visitors.

It is one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art history, and in particular is, together with his Ghent Altarpiece, the oldest of all the very famous paintings in oils, signed and dated by Van Eyck in 1434. But there is a discrepancy over this painting, deducing a hidden agenda; leaving a trail of deceit.

Jan van Eyck The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 Oil on oak panel of 3 vertical boards National Gallery, London

In Hockney's painting, the positioning of the two figures is reversed from the Arnolfini Portrait with the implication that Birtwell is the dominant partner. The lilies adjacent to Birtwell are a symbol of female purity, associated with depictions of the Annunciation, as at the time of the portrait, Birtwell was pregnant.

Liz Maw's paintings are enigmatic. Maw sources from the masterfully crafted paintings to be found in Northern Renaissance and early Mannerist paintings and from pages of popular culture. Maw synthesizes historical and contemporary styles. She creates evocative images that examine the tradition of painting and the role of the female form. Following in the lines of Cranach, Lucas the Elder (b.1472-1553 Germany), Maw exonerates and glorifies her subject by way of mythological and biblical scenarios.

Liz Maw Mysterious, 2006 oil on board Courtesy the artist, private collection, Auckland and Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland

First we had Odd Nerdrum (Norwegian Painter, born 1944) reviving the technique and style of Rembrant. Now we have Liz Maw hitting on Cranach and Durer. Is she aspiring to paint like the old masters, or has she just decided to rely on tried and tested formulas for artistic success? Maw has obviously understood the magnetic appeal that German Renaissance nudes emanate with the pristine alabaster bodies and blondness. Cranach was painting an ideal of beauty formulated by the tastes of early sixteen century Northern Europe. That these cannons of beauty are little changed five centuries later is insurmountable. Maw has glorified the luscious wholesome beauty of girls paralleling them to the models in celebrated paintings of Cranach's era. Imagine the heads of Michelle Pfeiffer, Gwyneth Paltrow or even Britney Spears placed on Cranach's bodies, coaxed into a mixture of poses quoting from both renaissance standards and contemporary manners and you have Liz Maw's formula.

Mystic Truths is at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
30 June - 14 October 2007