Albert has been creating art since his college days at New York University (BPA / 1984-1988), where he studied business. During that time, he became interested in art after visiting many of the great museums of New York City and seeing many great masterpieces, and soon after began making art in his own personal quest to create a masterpiece worthy of hanging at a major museum. His art has evolved from doodles and pen & ink, to serious wax oil drawings, to the cubist mosaic cereal box collages (Cerealism) he has become known for.  In the past two decades he has been creating large-scale “Epic” collage works using the cardboard packaging of iconic consumer brands on various themes including: History, Literature, Famous Quotes, Biblical & Religious themes, Music, Lyrics, Clocks, Botany, Mathematics, Geography, Logo Montages & Color Studies. He is the founder/owner of Sir Real, a brand of fruit juice & natural foods found at specialty markets in the greater NY Metro area including at Schiavoni’s Market right across the street! Since the publishing of his first book, an artist’s autobiography titled, “An Artist’s America” (Henry Holt, 2008), he has developed a traveling Pop art enrichment program & hands-on collage workshop for all age groups called the “Modern Pop Art Experience”, which he has brought to over 1,000 schools, libraries, museums & other arts venues all over the USA & in Europe. We are pleased to welcome Michael Albert back at Kramoris Gallery this July. The selection of limited edition giclee prints on canvas, rare silkscreens, original collages and self-published offset prints spans 30 years of his art.

From an art-historical perspective, Michael Albert’s use of actual consumer packaging rather than painted or printed representations of brands marks an important development in the evolution of Pop Art and its predecessors.

From Representation to Incorporation

Classical Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein generally represented images from mass culture. Warhol painted and silkscreened soup cans and celebrity photographs; Lichtenstein recreated comic-book panels by hand. Their works transformed commercial imagery into art while maintaining a distinction between the artwork and the consumer object.

Albert collapses that distinction. Instead of depicting a cereal box, candy wrapper, or beer carton, he uses the actual packaging as his medium. The commercial artifact itself enters the artwork. This shifts the conversation from “images of consumer culture” to “consumer culture materially present in the artwork.”

Connection to the Readymade Tradition

Albert’s practice also links Pop Art to the earlier tradition of the readymade pioneered by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp challenged conventional definitions of art by presenting manufactured objects as artworks. Albert does not simply display found objects; he cuts, arranges, and transforms them. His collages occupy a space between Duchamp’s readymades and Pop Art’s fascination with mass-produced imagery.

Art historians might see Albert’s work as a synthesis of:

• Duchamp’s use of ordinary manufactured objects.
• The assemblage practices of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg.
• Pop Art’s engagement with branding and consumer culture.

Authenticity and Material Culture

Using real packaging gives the work a documentary quality. A piece made from actual candy boxes or beer cartons contains evidence of a particular historical moment: graphic design trends, corporate logos, marketing strategies, and consumer habits. Future viewers can read the artwork as a record of material culture in ways that a painted reproduction cannot provide.

In this sense, Albert’s collages function almost like cultural archives. The packaging is not merely a symbol of consumerism; it is a physical remnant of it.

Environmental and Post-Pop Concerns

The first generation of Pop artists emerged during an era of expanding consumer abundance. Albert, working decades later, creates art in a period increasingly concerned with waste, recycling, and sustainability. By reusing discarded packaging, he introduces ecological questions largely absent from early Pop Art.

This moves the work beyond Pop’s original fascination with mass production toward a contemporary examination of the afterlife of consumer goods.

The Medium Becomes the Message

Art historically, one of the most significant aspects of Albert’s approach is that the material carries the meaning. A painted image of a beer carton comments on consumer culture; an artwork physically constructed from hundreds of beer cartons embodies consumer culture. The medium is no longer neutral. The artwork’s substance and subject are inseparable.

A Shift in Pop Art’s Legacy

Seen within the broader history of modern and contemporary art, Albert’s collages represent a progression:

1. Cubism incorporated fragments of newspapers and printed matter into art.
2. Dada introduced found objects and readymades.
3. Assemblage artists integrated real-world materials.
4. Pop Art celebrated and critiqued mass-media imagery.
5. Albert’s Post-Pop collages merge all of these traditions by constructing images from the actual branded materials that define contemporary consumer life.

For that reason, Albert’s significance is not merely that he uses brand imagery. It is that he transforms the physical products of consumer culture into both the content and the structure of the artwork, making his collages a distinctive continuation of several major twentieth-century artistic traditions at once.