Andy Warhol - Serial Portraits

Andy Warhol was a multifaceted figure, one of Pop Art’s great masters and an extremely prolific artist who worked in New York from 1949, when he started out as advertising illustrator, until his death in 1987. Though perhaps best-known for his colourful, mass-produced silkscreen prints, he was also a film director, music producer, show designer, television host and celebrity magazine editor. As he pursued a variety of career paths, he enjoyed manipulating his own image to create numerous avatars — as evidenced by the silkscreened self-portraits and abundant staged photographs he made throughout his career.

Portraiture had always been central to Warhol’s work, from his studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) until his death in New York in 1987. He compulsively sketched, photographed, filmed and silkscreened the people in his entourage, notably movie stars and figures of the high society and art scene. As the decades passed, the images he captured of these innumerable individuals came to form a collective portrait of that day and age.

When he was young, Warhol began collecting newspaper clippings of celebrities and quickly learned the importance of properly “staging” oneself to achieve the greatest media impact. Donning a wig and dark glasses, he created an enigmatic persona that he sought to publicise as much as possible to ensure successful sales of his artwork. He was a master of disguise and masquerade, embodying a wide range of characters in his posed photographs and self-portraits. His “in drag” Polaroids, for which he changed his looks to resemble a woman, as well as the numerous Self-Portraits he created over his career, demonstrate his ability to camouflage his appearance, raising questions about identity and image manipulation.

From his photo booth Self-Portrait of 1963-64 to 1981’s enigmatic The Shadow, the works assembled here illustrate both the evolution of the artist’s media image and the technical and stylistic development of his artistic practice. His rarely shown drawings of young men, sketched in ballpoint pen in the 1950s, open the exhibition and offer an uncommon glimpse of the expressive, highly personal style that was characteristic of his early advertising illustrations. Though this brilliant mastery of drawing would occasionally resurface as he pursued his art, it would become more discreet in the screenprints to come. This exhibition establishes a common thread connecting the intimate Unidentified Male sketches to the photo booth shots in a dishevelled “fright wig” taken the year before the artist’s death to his 1980s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, the fruit of a ceaseless exploration of mechanised artistic techniques. From behind his dark glasses, through his silkscreening and use of diverse camera forms, Andy Warhol once again demonstrates his unparalleled capacity for adaptation and innovation.