His literal, explicit studies of nudes painted in 1954-55 were one of the first major attacks on Abstract Expressionism. In his experimenting with figure sculpture, he has developed a characteristic image rooted in Cubist (early Duchamp) fragmentation and simultaneity.
Trova has invented a disconcerting symbol of humanity in modern times. Anonymous, human yet machined, with machine appendages. The effect of Trova's works is to provide a glimpse into a frightening science-fiction future into which humanity has stumbled into.
For a period in the mid 1960s, he utilized scenes of destruction or disaster taken from press photographs and presented them with the same impersonality, suggesting that the aspects of the scene can breed indifference.
In the later 1960s turned more to the making of films. These films, termed "underground movies" used his principle of monotonous repetition, which gradually becomes hypnotic in effect.
Wesselman came forward as a the artist of the television commercial and of movie-magazine sex. Using assemblage elements -real clocks, television sets, air conditioners, with photomontage effects for window views, plus sound effects- creating an urban environment in which the aggressive reality of actual object or photographic images gave them a sense of unreality as compared with the painted images.
Rosenquist worked for a period as a bill board painter. This gave him experience over commercial art, which he translated into huge paintings of fragmented reality put together under controlled cubism.
Ruscha used gas stations to symbolize the monotonous conformity of the American life. He continues with this process in photographic "documentation" during a later Conceptual phase.
Robert Indiana has been obsessed with word images. Indiana's word-images are often bitter indictments, in code, of modern life, and sometimes even a devastating indictment of brutality.
