Andy Warhol
Red Jackie 1964
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
101.6 x 101.9 x 2.5cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Exhibition overview

The exhibition will address several important periods in Warhol’s oeuvre, in addition to a number of key themes that characterise his practice.

1950s

The earliest section in the exhibition, this group of works on paper was executed while Warhol was a commercial artist in New York. It presents his first works as an illustrator in addition to his early interest in subjects including fashion, glamour and beauty, and techniques such as blotted lines and stamped images that became defining characteristics of this period of his art practice.

First pop works and the commodity

This group of important works from the early 1960s addresses Warhol’s first pop experiments through to his iconic commodity paintings, including a group of Campbell’s Soup Can works and box sculptures.

Celebrity portraits and icons

This section of the exhibition will span Warhol’s first portraits of the early 1960s, through to his portraits of icons such as Mao, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley and his celebrity portraits of the 1980s. His exploration of portraiture across different media will be considered with films such as Sleep 1963, Empire 1964 and a series of Screen Tests displayed alongside major paintings of stars, musicians and celebrities.

‘Death in America’

Warhol’s ‘Death in America’ series, executed between 1963 and 1968, is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal bodies of work in postwar American art. The exhibition will include a significant body of these extraordinary paintings which are rarely seen in depth outside the United States.

Late works

This group of works addresses key subjects in Warhol’s last decade of practice, focusing particularly on his return to painting. This section of the exhibition will investigate Warhol’s experiments with abstraction (including Oxidation and Shadows), and iconic works of the 1970s and 1980s such as Hammer and Sickle 1976, Dollar Sign 1981, The Last Supper 1986 and the Camouflage works of 1987.

Warhol's World

This section of the exhibition features a broad range of documentary photographs of Warhol and his milieu. It includes images of social scenes at the Factory, clubbing at Studio 54, as well as Warhol making art and films. It includes a projection of a sequence from Andy Warhol’s Factory Diaries, Self-Portrait paintings, Time Capsules, drawings, photographs and videos. Overlapping with the content of Images of Andy, Warhol’s World will provide a broader view of Warhol’s activities both from within, and outside, the art world. Images of Warhol by photographers such as Billy Name, Nat Finkelstein and Christopher Makos will provide a visual chronology from the 1960s to the 1980s. Film and video features in this section of the exhibition, with inclusions such as Warhol’s The Velvet Underground and Nico — the film used as a backdrop for Velvet Underground performances, like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

Andy Warhol’s T.V.

In the late 1970s Warhol expanded to work in television beginning with the program Fashion 1970–80. Several episodes from the series will screen in the exhibition along with episodes from his later series Andy Warhol’s T.V. 1980–83 and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes 1985–87. Andy Warhol’s T.V. was modelled on Interview magazine and featured guest celebrities in conversation with Warhol.

Time Capsules

In 1974, motivated by a desire for order before moving from his Union Square studio to a new location on Broadway, Warhol began collecting and collating his belongings into uniform cardboard boxes. These boxes of ephemera, called Time Capsules, display the objects and materials that consumed his daily life, including mail, photographs, clothes and newspaper clippings. The Time Capsules number over 600 and the contents offer an intriguing insight into the detail and social context of Warhol’s life. The Andy Warhol Museum has painstakingly inventoried around 120, and three Time Capsules (21, 68 and 237) will feature in the exhibition.

Interview magazine

Included in the exhibition are more than 70 issues of Warhol’s Interview magazine published between November 1969 and the late 1980s. Born of his fascination with fame, Interview was dedicated to the cult of celebrity and featured candid conversations with the famous and soon-to-be famous. During the 1980s Warhol withdrew from the everyday functioning of the magazine but remained its ambassador, at times staging impromptu book signing events on the streets of Manhattan.

Andy’s books

In addition to the publishing of Interview magazine, Warhol published a series of books which will be available to visitors in the exhibition space. Books such as The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), a: a novel, Andy Warhol’s Exposures and The Andy Warhol Diaries will provide fascinating, gossipy insights to Warhol’s world of celebrity, fame, fashion and fickle superstars.

Film, video and screening program

The Australian Cinémathèque in the Gallery of Modern Art will present a major program of restored films and Screen Tests from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The program provides a comprehensive overview of Warhol’s prolific film production between 1963 and 1968 and traces the development of his experimental and underground films, expanded cinema, and scripted and improvised scenarios.

Including more than 50 short and feature films, the program will be one of the largest and most complete surveys of the artist’s film works to date. It follows the largest retrospective of Warhol films held at the British Film Institute, London, in August 2007.

'The Silver Factory: Andy Warhol for Kids'

For the duration of the ‘Andy Warhol’ exhibition, the Gallery has curated a program especially for children to be presented in the Children’s Art Centre spaces in the Gallery of Modern Art.

‘The Silver Factory: Andy Warhol for Kids’ will feature two rarely seen bodies of work: a version of Warhol’s 1983 exhibition 'Toy Paintings', in which he installed paintings of toys at child’s height over a fish wallpaper, and a suite of drawings titled A Was a Lady Who Went Shopping at Saks c.1953.

Art work-related interactive activities developed by the Gallery, including a 2007 version of Warhol’s Silver Clouds 1966 installation, will be enjoyed by children of all ages. Admission to ‘The Silver Factory: Andy Warhol for Kids’ is free.