Andy Warhol.
Duration June 9th, 2024 - October 6th, 2024
Location New National Gallery
Andy Warhol is probably one of the most famous and discussed artists of the 20th century. While his depictions of consumer goods and famous people were widely distributed, there is a common thread that runs through his career - from as early as the late 1940s to his untimely death in the 1980s. He constantly searched for an ideal of beauty - male beauty, and for a form. He wanted to create lasting images of what he desired. Therefore, he visualized and immortalized this persistent pursuit of ideal beauty.
From his early line drawings to the screen tests and experiments with moving images and films in the 1960s, the torso paintings in the 1970s, to his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, there is a continuous search for the expression of this ideal. During his lifetime, these works were considered either inappropriate, immoral, perverted, or even pornographic and illegal. For this reason, many of them never received the public attention and recognition they deserved.
For the first time, the Neue Nationalgalerie is putting together a major overview that focuses thematically on this central aspect of Warhol's various creative phases and career stages. With more than two hundred and fifty works, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, Polaroids, films and collages, the exhibition provides a comprehensive and inclusive understanding of Warhol, who never truly “came out” during his lifetime.
The exhibition “Andy Warhol. Velvet Rage and Beauty is an homage to the book The Velvet Rage, which describes what it feels like to grow up and live as a gay man in a predominantly heterosexual world. Warhol died in 1987 at just fifty-eight years old. He left behind an incredibly complex and influential body of work, but during his lifetime he never received the open acceptance that we have today to devote ourselves to this specific work. While this openness seems to be at risk again today due to changes in numerous societies, the exhibition in Berlin in 2024 takes the opportunity to bring these works together for the first and hopefully not the last time.
Curatorial team
The exhibition is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and Lisa Botti, co-curator.
Catalog for the exhibition
A catalog will be published by Prestel Verlag to accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition is made possible by the Friends of the National Gallery.
A special exhibition at the Nationalgalerie – Berlin State Museums
Photo Credit Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait in Drag, 1980, Polaroid™ Polacolor, 10.8 x 8.6 cm © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York