February 04, 2018
Warhol at CaixaForum Madrid
An exhibition on the creative development of Andy Warhol, from his beginnings as a graphic designer in New York until his death.
The exhibition highlights the way in which Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, 1928 – New York, 1987) captures the cult of merchandise that emerged from nineteenth-century industrial inventions. Always attentive to technical and industrial progress, Warhol used all kinds of techniques and machines, from serigraphy to video recorder, with productive patterns that he himself defined as “typical of an assembly line”.
This mechanical art, seemingly impersonal, cynically denies any intentional spiritual charge. The nihilistic silence of Warhol is, in fact, one of the factors that give poetic height to his work. Along with a selection of essays written by theorists of his work, the exhibition includes a section of portraits of the artist, taken by photographers such as Alberto Schommer, Richard Avedon or Robert Mapplethorpe.
Warhol was established as the pop artist par excellence in the sixties, both among the intellectual elite and among the general public, thanks to works based on the reformulation of different consumer products such as Campbell’s soup series or the transformation of large icons of his time, as actors, politicians or singers. Following the same fusion principle, he developed the Silver Factory, an experimental cultural laboratory that was, at the same time, the seat of a new type of cultural enterprise.
After overcoming an assassination attempt in 1968, Warhol changed creative tactics and becomes a character of himself, hidden behind his characteristic hairstyle and his notorious glasses. He moves the headquarters of his commercial and aesthetic operations to The Office, a more bourgeois and logistically organized space that definitively consolidates him in an artist-entrepreneur, capable at the same time of directing the Interview magazine, painting famous portraits and accepting all kinds of commissions commercial until the moment of his death.
From February 1 to May 8, 2018
More information here