Andy Warhol is mostly known as a pop artist but in this exhibition, we really wanted to return to the man
and think about all of the desires, the fears that may have that drove him to create art
We wanted to take him out of the hype
and start to look at Andy Warhol through the three lenses of the idea of the immigrant story
His queer identity and the idea of death and religion
He was born in Pittsburgh to parents who had come all the way from present-day Slovakia
They lived in what he referred to as the Czech ghetto in Pittsburg, it’s a poor upbringing
Right at the very beginning of the exhibition
you see the documents that really marked the moment at which Warhol's family come into America
What's intriguing for me is to connect the Statue of Liberty painting from that very first document
And there's this evolution of an identity that's quite interesting as well
I mean, Andy Warhol was essentially growing up and finding himself
He was an artist that really, despite all of his insecurities, tried to be himself
And part of that was his gay identity and very often a lot of his works explore same-sex desire
And you see that in a number of the early drawings that he does in the 50s
which often depict men he knew or men he desired
There is that sort of sense of Warhol arriving in New York
into what must have been, as you say, a very glitzy different world
where he finds many people that he relates to
So Warhol had this career as a commercial illustrator that made him enough money
to buy a house in Lexington Avenue in the middle of New York
And then he got another midtown studio which turned out to be the silver factory
and this is the moment, really when that when the 60s come together
rock stars, musicians, actors, would always descend upon the factory as a place to go
And the factory was the place where Warhol created his paintings
But it was a place where he made a lot of his films
Part of that now becomes his managing a band called the Velvet Underground and bringing in Nico
You can see an overspill of the work that he's doing in film
that suddenly being projected over a band in front of a live audience
One of the best pieces he ever produced were the silver clouds
And they become very literal realisations of the idea of the intangible object, something that's floating in air
They’re extraordinarily powerful works, he knew it at the time
So there's been a move away from the silver factory and the landlords have kicked everyone out
basically, and so he has to find a new place to work
In June 1968, not long after the May ‘68 riots in Europe, Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas tried to shoot her publisher who she couldn't find, so she shifted Target to Warhol
and she claimed to have done it because Warhol had too much control over her life
She slipped into the lift with them and they rode the lift together up to the sixth floor
Valerie brings out a gun and she shoots him just under his right arm
The bullet pierces every major organ except his heart, Warhol was never the same after
The shooting really is often seen to signify a great shift in his practice, but also in his life
He becomes a little bit more nervous around people
It takes him quite a few years to start to enter into the same kind of social world that he was associated with
He then starts to return to painting
Ladies and Gentlemen was commissioned by an Italian art dealer, he asked Warhol to depict drag performers
The result of the project led to this really large group of paintings
where Warhol really pushes how he uses color, how he uses paint
It’s now seen as a really unique portrait of a community that was rarely depicted at the time
You can see at times he's trying to actually actively sort of almost recreate these actions from the models
somehow engaging in their performance through his own painterly performance
We have 60 last suppers, which is one of the largest works
And it's the work that really unites many of the themes of the show
It's a religious image, It's an image that depicts men socializing
which in many respects reflects Warhol’s interest in social scenes and the space of the factory
And it was also created at a time where Warhol was increasingly
being surrounded by death because of the AIDS epidemic,
which claimed the life of his ex-boyfriend and he was still suffering from the remnants of his shooting
It's that sense of us being processed through life
and just being in a way no different from anyone or anything else
Throughout Warhol’s life, he was very often quite insecure about his appearance
He starts to bald at quite a young age and actually 60s paintings like ‘Before and After’
which depict a nose job kind of play on this
kind of obsession with his own body and his obsession with the idea of beauty
In the late 50s, he starts to wear a toupee that then eventually becomes this very iconic silver wig
By the 80s he is highly recognisable to many as this Warhol persona.
He’s become a brand
The art historian John Richardson used to refer to Warhol as a recording device
He was constantly recording the life around him
And I think Warhol really understood the strengths of both
of how to edit the world and how to put himself in the world
And as a result, Andy Warhol is one of the most important artists of the last half of the 20th century
And as I firmly believe, most likely to be very important in this century