Can it be possible that there’s a Warhol we haven’t seen? Yes, apparently, quite a few, and ten of them will be on view to the public on the UK for the first time from today.
Andy Warhol’s rarely seen original Ads paintings were created in 1985, as a set of ten painted canvases and a portfolio of prints. Each depicts Warhol’s hand-made, vividly coloured take on a different famous advertisement, from Apple Computers to Chanel No.5, Volkswagen cars to Lifesavers (a sweet a bit like fruit polos, since you ask).
Both the silkscreen prints and the paintings will be displayed together in the UK for the first time at Halcyon Gallery, as part of its new major exhibition, Andy Warhol: Beyond the Brand, which also features a number of the artist’s most iconic print portfolios, shown in their entirety, and a selection of his commercial work as well as original canvases.
“Ads is a masterful culmination of Warhol’s career-long interest in the blurred lines between commercialism and fine art,” explains art historian and museum curator Joachim Pissarro, who has contributed the essay for the exhibition.
“These ads radiate themes such as cosmopolitanism, technology, movie stardom, political power, elegance and luxury in a visual vocabulary that was at stark odds with the deceptively homespun, quaint but enchanting output of Warhol’s own wildly successful career as a commercial illustrator thirty years prior.”
Far from the artist being ashamed of his commercial background, it informed Warhol’s long-standing, deep fascination with the intersection of culture, commerce and celebrity. Other works in the show depict cultural icons such as Mickey Mouse and Superman, Jane Fonda, Mick Jagger and Queen Elizabeth II, while it’s now almost impossible to work out whether Campbell’s soup – which features in a number of the works on display, including the three-dimensional acrylic and silkscreen work Campbell’s Soup Box: Chicken Noodle with White Chicken Meat, 1986 – is best known as a Warhol subject or, well, soup.
The vibrant show, spread across the gallery’s two Mayfair sites at 29 and 148 New Bond Street, provides a comprehensive overview of Warhol’s creative life, from his earliest artworks and illustrations to the last works he ever produced and reveals the development of his unique artistic vision.
“Warhol’s seismic contribution to the story of art is that he tied his work to a collective consciousness more closely than any other artist had before,” says Kate Brown, Halcyon Gallery’s creative director, who has curated the exhibition.
“His art is a pure reflection of popular culture in his lifetime and the spirit of western capitalism.” Embracing and not condescending to mainstream interests and taste, Warhol has become one of the most influential artists of the 20th century – and the most famous, for considerably more than the 15 minutes he predicted for everyone else.
