Gagosian to present Andy Warhol’s Long Shadow in Hong Kong coinciding with Art Basel Hong Kong.
Organized for the gallery by Jessica Beck, formerly of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, the exhibition considers Warhol’s ongoing cultural impact by juxtaposing key paintings, photographs, and films by the artist with works by some of his contemporaries and successors, including Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Urs Fischer, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Alex Israel, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Warhol was one of the most prolific artists of the twentieth century, and his work’s staying power has been augmented by its enormous diversity. Over the course of four decades, he continually reinvented his practice, moving from his intimate drawings of the 1950s to iconic silkscreened Pop paintings of celebrities, consumer goods, and disasters in the 1960s; portraits of the social elite in the 1970s; and photographs, television shows, and collaborative projects in the 1980s. This heterogeneity has seen Warhol’s legacy inform and inspire numerous contemporary artists.
Warhol’s paintings Silver Liz [Studio Type] (1963), Mao (1973), and Marilyn Monroe (1979), and his Screen Test film of Donyale Luna (1965–66), redefined portraiture in relation to contemporary style, power, and celebrity. In addition, Brillo Box (1964) and Dollar Sign (1981) brought commercial design and financial icons into the realm of fine art, while his Flowers (1964) and Shadows series (1978–79) introduced new modes of abstraction.
The new styles of representation that Warhol developed and his challenging of gender norms both resonate with the thematic centrality of identity, glamour, and performance to photographs by Nan Goldin, which here include Ivy in opera gloves, Boston (1972). Jean-Michel Basquiat’s double portrait of himself with Warhol, Dos Cabezas (1982), was made shortly after Basquiat first met his idol, while Sweet Pungent (1984–85) is one of more than 160 paintings on which the pair collaborated—it also saw Warhol return to painting by hand.
As often as Warhol experimented with new art-making strategies, he also reimagined his public persona through techniques of doubling, masking, and recording. In his Polaroid Self-Portrait in Fright Wig (1986), he alters his appearance by donning silver wig and sunglasses, also obscuring his features in shadow. Foregrounding an uneasy affinity with this approach, Douglas Gordon’s Self-Portrait of You +Me (2 piece) Andy (2008) comprises a commercial reproduction of a self-portrait of a bewigged Warhol that is partially burned, split, and mounted to a mirrored background. Dew (2023) by Urs Fischer employs post-Warholian strategies of appropriation and transformation of commercial imagery, while in The Athlete (2024), Nathaniel Mary Quinn interprets Polaroids and paintings of Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Warhol’s Athletes series, along with a Campbell’s soup can.
Zeng Fanzhi’s double portrait of himself and Warhol in Fly (2000) imagines the two artists—their features hidden behind identical masks—standing in a field of flowers, as two jets fly overhead. A new painting by Takashi Murakami echoes Warhol’s Flowers by abstracting from nature to create an instantly recognizable form, while Sky (2012) by Alex Israel recalls the Pop artist’s embrace of artificiality. Cool Down Bench (RWB) (2023) by Derrick Adams embraces popular culture, Untitled (2010) by Richard Prince employs a humor conversant with Warhol’s, and Sterling Ruby’s BC (4833) (2014) is inspired in part by Warhol’s Rorschach paintings. Through these works, Andy Warhol’s Long Shadow brings to light unexpected juxtapositions with artists whose work “thinks” through, with, and beyond Warhol’s oeuvre, demonstrating its enduring relevance.
ANDY WARHOL’S LONG SHADOW, March 25th–May 11th, 2024, Gagosian Hong Kong
Opening reception: Monday, March 25th, 6–8pm
About the artist
Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, and died in New York in 1987. Collections include Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Bibliotèque nationale de France, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille, France; Tate, London; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City. Warhol’s work has been the subject of exhibitions throughout the world, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989), and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2001–02, traveled to Tate Modern, London, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2002). Recent exhibitions include From A to B and Back Again, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018–19, traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2019, and Art Institute of Chicago, 2019–20); Tate Modern, London (2020); and Revelation, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021–22). Warhol made sixty experimental films as well as the television programs Andy Warhol’s TV (1982) and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1986) and was the founding publisher of Interview magazine.
