Pop Artwork: 17 Underrated Contemporary Artists You Should Know
Pop artwork has moved far beyond its early definitions, shaped by artists responding to the culture around them in direct and personal ways. What once leaned heavily on mass imagery now reflects individual perspective, with artists pulling from everyday references and reworking them through their own experiences. The result is work that feels familiar at first glance, yet clearly authored, grounded in shared experience.
This evolution has opened the door for artists working across different disciplines, many of whom remain overlooked despite consistent bodies of work. Their practices use imagery drawn from everyday life, reshaped through styles they have developed over time. Advertising, celebrity, and mass culture serve as reference points, filtered through personal perspective and lived experience. The artists that follow reflect how pop artwork exists today, defined by distinct points of view.
1. D*Face
Born Dean Stockton, D*Face emerged from London’s street culture as graffiti and skate graphics were breaking into the mainstream. His work grew out of public space and never lost that energy, even as it moved into galleries, studios, and large scale installations.
His imagery pulls from comics, advertising, and pop culture with a bold graphic edge, presenting figures that register instantly through bright color, strong outlines, and a clear attitude. What starts playful often carries a sharper message underneath, touching on fame and desire.
D*Face has built a practice that moves easily between street work and institutional settings without losing impact. That range reflects how pop artwork exists today. Flexible. Visually direct. Designed to live across walls, objects, and environments while staying rooted in the culture that inspired it.
2. Sandra Chevrier
Sandra Chevrier is known for her Cages series, where female portraits are painted alongside hand rendered comic book imagery. The figures appear composed yet partially obscured, balancing presence with restraint as the painted layers both reveal and conceal what lies beneath. Strength is present, but it is tempered by vulnerability, as the comic imagery asserts itself without overtaking the subject. Chevrier uses pop imagery to frame portraits that hover between fantasy and reality, allowing power and nuance to exist in the same image.
View available works by Sandra Chevrier
3. Ben Frost
Ben Frost works with images that feel instantly recognizable, then lets them misbehave. Familiar symbols are nudged out of alignment, just enough to interrupt their original purpose and invite a second look.
What distinguishes Frost’s work is the pairing. Images that rarely share space are brought together with a kind of deadpan confidence, as if they’ve always belonged there. The effect is disarming. Meaning surfaces not through explanation, but through proximity, leaving the viewer to enjoy the joke and reckon with it at the same time.
4. Roger J. Carter 
Roger J. Carter works with materials most people recognize immediately: Legos, toy soldiers, playing cards, and plastic figures are assembled into portraits of figures whose influence was shaped through struggle, resolve, and public presence. The choice of material is deliberate, with medium and subject paired in ways that quietly reinforce meaning.
The image registers quickly at a distance. Up close, the labor asserts itself. A portrait constructed from army men takes on a sharper presence, built through repetition and care as the materials speak with their own authority.
View available works by Roger J. Carter
5. HateCopy
Working under the name HateCopy, Maria Qamar makes paintings that feel familiar to fans of the pop art movement, then subtly shift its point of view. Her figures recall the graphic clarity and bold color of comic imagery, but the emphasis has changed. The women at the center of her work are not symbols or caricatures. They speak directly, often with humor sharpened by experience.
Qamar’s paintings reflect how pop art has evolved as its audience has widened. Using irony and satire, she draws from the realities of South Asian identity in Western culture, folding contemporary dialogue and social tension into a format once shaped by a narrower lens.
6. Arthur J. Williams Jr. 
Arthur J. Williams Jr. is one of the few contemporary artists whose relationship to money is not theoretical. Before it became his medium, it was his subject of study. In the 1990s, Williams gained notoriety for successfully counterfeiting U.S. currency, becoming the first person known to replicate every security feature of the redesigned 1996 hundred-dollar bill.
That level of mastery eventually drew federal attention, ending in multiple arrests and years in prison. After his release, Williams returned to the same skill set with a different purpose. The precision once used to deceive is now applied to construction, as currency becomes material rather than target. His work stands as a rare kind of second act, where technical knowledge survives its past and is redirected toward something lasting.
View available works by Arthur J. Williams Jr.
7. Plastic Jesus
Working in Los Angeles, the British-born artist known as Plastic Jesus takes familiar cultural symbols and repackages them as new. Logos, objects, and public references are lifted from their usual settings and returned with altered purpose, less as commentary than as moments that interrupt familiarity.
As a pop artist, his work balances spectacle with control. The images are designed to be seen, but they hold their meaning through placement and context rather than excess. Once removed from their expected roles, familiar symbols begin to register differently, revealing how easily they are absorbed and how rarely they are examined.
8. Trust.iCON
Emerging from Thamesmead in southeast London and working anonymously across London, Berlin, and Los Angeles, Trust.iCON approaches street art as a form of public presence. His work appears in transitional spaces, using simplified pop imagery to create direct, legible compositions.
What distinguishes the artist’s practice is an understanding of recognition as leverage. The figures are familiar, but their placement alters their function, shifting them from entertainment into something closer to commentary. By relying on clarity, scale, and context, the work resists excess and avoids explanation.
9. DAIN
DAIN built his reputation on the street, long before his work reached a gallery setting. In New York, his portraits began appearing on brick walls, construction barriers, and temporary facades, standing apart from standard graffiti in both form and intent.
That early approach continues to shape his work today. Drawing from photographs associated with Hollywood’s golden era, DAIN builds each image through layered juxtapositions, fragments printed, pasted, painted over, and reassembled to his liking. The painted circle and drip around the eye, now inseparable from his practice, functions as a quiet point of focus, a gesture that draws attention back to the gaze itself, subtly reinforcing the idea of the eye as a site of inner life rather than surface appeal.
10. Nick Doyle
Using denim, indigo textiles, and miniature mechanical elements, Nick Doyle constructs wall mounted scenes that sit somewhere between sculpture and stage set. Denim, in his hands, becomes less a material than a symbol, carrying histories of labor, masculinity, aspiration, and American mythmaking.
His works often resemble carefully composed tableaux. Vending machines, signage, and everyday objects pull from a familiar landscape, with nostalgia serving as a focal point for creative reinterpretation. Influenced by Americana, Doyle reworks familiar cultural symbols to examine consumer culture and the rituals through which national identity is performed, situating his practice firmly within a more contemplative, concept driven approach to pop artwork.
11. Joseph Mayernik
Best known for his Hero Collage series, Joseph Mayernik works by cutting and reassembling vintage comic books into large scale compositions that bring story and memory into a single surface. Familiar figures appear fragmented and recomposed, no longer confined to panels or plot, but suspended in layered arrangements. In scenes of intimacy, such as couples locked in a kiss, meticulously cut imagery reveals a spectrum of expressions beneath the surface, suggesting the many emotional phases contained within a single moment.
What distinguishes Mayernik’s practice is its balance of nostalgia and authorship. Each work is constructed from rare or limited edition source material, embedding scarcity directly into the composition and lending the finished piece a singular physical presence. By dismantling narratives once consumed sequentially, he transforms familiar imagery into compositions that speak to a generation of viewers attuned to nuance, emotion, and layered storytelling.
View available works by Joseph Mayernik
12. Geoffrey Bouillot
Working in mixed media, Geoffrey Bouillot builds portraits that move through a cocktail of Pop Art, Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Manga. His figures appear fractured and in motion, assembled through overlapping marks and shifting angles that give the impression of constant revision. The paintings feel animated by speed and interruption, as if the image were being pulled apart and rebuilt in real time.
Pop imagery anchors the compositions, but recognition is only part of the experience. Celebrities and cultural icons serve as starting points, opening the work to broader questions of perception and repetition. Bouillot’s paintings appeal to a segment of avant-garde collectors drawn to genre-bending ideas.
13. E.LEE
E.LEE is a Chicago-based artist whose work examines how images move us emotionally, generate status, and accrue value through recognition. His practice is grounded in an awareness of how familiar imagery circulates in contemporary culture, shaping perception through repetition and association.
Working through popular culture, the artist often revisits childhood heroes such as Superman or Spider-Man, placing them into moments of vulnerability that shift the story being told. Using flat imagery, he transforms recognizable figures through the illusion of light and spatial depth, situating them within new contexts that invite closer consideration.
14. Charlotte Rose
Charlotte Rose centers her work on household products and everyday consumer goods, finding energy in their simplicity and familiarity. Bottles, packaging, and brand slogans are rendered in a contemporary form with a vintage feel, stripped down to their most direct and readable elements. The images feel confident and inviting, offering the kind of promise often associated with a better, brighter life.
In works like Baby You Make Me Hot, Rose isolates everyday products and amplifies their slogans, revealing how easily desire and emotion are shaped by commercial messaging. Within contemporary pop artwork, her practice appeals to collectors drawn to simplicity, functioning as an ode to a seemingly simpler, more optimistic era.
15. Trip One 
Stencil work is the foundation of Trip One’s practice, and it shows in the discipline of his execution. Each piece is built through a deliberate sequence of custom-cut stencils, often layered four or five times to construct the final image. What reads as effortless clarity is the result of careful planning and control, where every pass of paint determines what is revealed and what is withheld. The process is methodical and physical, demanding precision at every stage.
Imagery drawn from cartoons, popular culture, and symbols of wealth or reward is rendered with a finish that reflects both street origins and studio rigor. Rather than signing his name across each work, Trip One often incorporates the number 372, replacing traditional authorship with a unique identity.
View available works by Trip One
16. Darian Mederos
Often described as a Cuban art prodigy, Darian Rodriguez Mederos constructs his paintings around the meticulous illusion of bubble wrap, hand-painted directly onto the canvas. Faces emerge beneath this translucent grid, their features softened and interrupted, as if viewed through a protective layer. The imagery remains recognizable, yet slightly obscured, creating a tension between clarity and distance.
By rendering bubble wrap rather than applying it, Mederos turns surface into subject. What might initially read as a barrier becomes an invitation to slow down, rewarding sustained looking through precision, patience, and control. The result is work that feels at once familiar and unsettled, where technical mastery reshapes how an image is seen.
17. Peppy Colours
Working under the moniker Peppy Colours, Toronto-based artist Pepe Bratanov brings a background in design and art direction to a practice shaped by structure, repetition, and color. His work focuses on everyday objects and pop-culture symbols, stripping away excess detail so attention stays on the surface and the medium itself.
Best known for his ongoing Sprinkles series, the artist reconstructs familiar symbols using thousands of hand-placed candy sprinkles, turning common imagery into something tactile and visually arresting. By pairing familiar objects with a medium associated with innocence and adolescence, the work generates an unavoidable sense of positivity.
Leave a comment