Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again
Andy Warhol
From A to B and Back Again
It’s hard to believe that America hasn’t experienced a full-scale retrospective of one of its most beloved and celebrated icons, Andy Warhol, in over 30 years. Opening this week at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again” is the first comprehensive survey of the late Pop artist’s work in over three decades; reasserting Warhol’s overwhelming importance to a new generation as not only the king of Pop, but the monarch of celebrity, color, visual appropriation, and commonplace iconography – so much of what contemporary society is enthralled with today.
This expansive exhibition featuring over 350 works spread throughout the museum, includes a comprehensive selection of Warhol’s fashion sketches from the 1950s, early hand painted canvases – produced before the artist began utilizing his trademark screen-printing technique – Warhol’s celebrity portraits from the 1960s featuring the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, the artist’s prolific Death and Disaster series, a room of Warhol’s iconic silk-screened flowers, paintings of drag queens, dictators, Campbell Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, camouflage patterns, a selection of the artist’s films, and a gallery featuring over 80 examples of Warhol’s colorful society portraits – a body of work which he began in the late 60s and continued expanding upon until his untimely death in 1987.
With an overwhelmingly expansive oeuvre to choose from, curator Donna De Salvo does a sensational job of representing Warhol’s most characteristic paintings alongside a number of lesser-known works that have often been overlooked throughout his prolific career. This exhibition is a definite must see for art lovers and Warhol enthusiasts.
