Space Jam, Daddies ketchup – and other bizarre inspirations for high art

With his homage to the 90s animated film starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny, LA artist Devin Troy Strother joins the canon of pop art greats who immortalise funny objects

The 1996 film Space Jam, in which basketball hero Michael Jordan stars alongside Bugs Bunny and other Loony Toons characters, has been immortalised in paintings by the Los Angeles artist Devin Troy Strother. Is this the most unlikely artistic appropriation of popular culture ever? The short answer is no, not at all. Pop art has chosen plenty of icons to celebrate since the 1960s that are just as unexpected.

Typhoo Tea, the hot drinks brand, is the inspiration for the most “pop” painting David Hockney ever made. His 1961 work Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style transposes a nude on to a box of the tea. Hockney’s wry Yorkshire version of pop art is perhaps a sideways joke about Jasper Johns’s bronze 1960 sculpture of two cans of Ballantine ale, which Johns made after a friend joked that his art dealer Leo Castelli could sell anything, even a couple of cans of beer.

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