Summer 2011 in Porto Cervo Sardinia at the opening of the RUDOLF BUDJA GALLERY & COLONNA PEVERO HOTEL whilst exhibiting a wide selection of magnificent Andy Warhol portraits.
During his own lifetime ANDY WARHOL was considered the incarnation of the “pop” artist. Today this reputation is stronger than ever and Warhol’s artworks have been increasing in importance and value dramatically in recent years. Warhol made standardization the theme of his art and limited it to the distanced presentation of banal objects from the consumer and media worlds. His idols, like Marilyn and Mao, were not presented as human beings made of flesh and blood but as the products of a commercial world.
Following his most celebrated statement that “in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes”, Andy Warhol begun in the ‘60’s to produce photography derived paintings of famous people. He took faces from mass media, banal in their newspaper everydayness, and transformed them into paintings and prints, portraying in this fashion celebrities from arts and politics, contributing to the process of making them true icons of the 20th century.
After critics finally greeted his Factory as an appropriate artistic venue, the Warhol mania exploded in New York and all the fashionable, but still common, people wanted to redeem their 15 minutes of fame by getting their portrait depicted by Andy. The artist was in fact fascinated with the process of the “celebrification of nobodies” which marks the beginning of an era in which media attention became the new mirror of the individual’s self-perception.
"Everything is sort of artificial. I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts." A.W.
ABOUT ANDY WARHOL
Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928. In 1945 he majored in pictorial design at the Carnegie University. Upon graduation, Warhol moved to New York where he worked as an illustrator for several magazines including Vogue and the New Yorker and did advertising and window displays for big retail stores. Prophetically, his first assignment was for Glamour magazine for an article titled “Success in New York”.
Throughout the 50s, Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist experimenting with comic-like artworks. He came in contact with the famous gallery owner Leo Castelli, who revealed that Roy Lichtenstein had presented his comics there only a couple of weeks before.
Warhol was forced to find his own style, finally making standardization the basic theme of his art by creating distant images of banal products of the consumer world. Colour only contributes to increase the unreality of a given image based on an actual photograph, such as with the screen prints of “Disasters” or the ”Electric Chair” series. His icons “Elvis” or “Marilyn” don’t show human beings but products of a commercial world. In 1952 the artist had his first individual show at the Hugo Gallery and his first group show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956.
The 60s was an extremely prolific decade for Warhol. Appropriating images from popular culture, Warhol created many paintings that remain icons of 20th century art, such as the Campbell’s Soup Cans, Disasters and Marilyn’s. He was the first involving highest quality into the printmaking process and set the basis of POP: reproducible art affordable for everyone.
All at once Warhol decided to stop painting and started making several 16mm films, which have become underground classics such as Chelsea Girls, Empire and Blow Job. In 1968, Valerie Solanis, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men) walked into Warhol’s studio, known as the factory, and shot the artist. The attack was nearly fatal.
At he start of the 70ies, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine and renewed his focus on painting. Works created in this decade include Mao’s, Sculls, Torsos and Shadows and many commissioned portraits. He also published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, Warhol exhibited his work extensively in museums and galleries around the world.
Famous artworks of the early 80s were the Retrospectives and the Reversal series. He also created two cable television shows. His paintings include The Last Supper, Rorschach’s and in return to his first great theme of Pop, a series called Ads. Warhol also engaged in a series of collaborations with younger artists, including Jean Michel Basquiat, F. Clemente and K. Haring.
Following a routine gall bladder surgery, Andy Warhol died February 22, 1987. More than 2000 people attended the memorial mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. In 1989 the Modern Museum of Modern Art inn New York had a major retrospective of his works, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh in May 1994. It took another decade to remember the great achievements of Warhol, when major retrospectives of his work were held at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Berlin (2000) followed by a show at the Tate Modern in London in 2001.
CURATOR
RUDOLF BUDJA GALLERY is one of the leading art galleries worldwide dealing with Andy Warhol.
HOST
Located in Porto Cervo, on the amazing Pevero Bay, the Colonna Pevero Hotel is one of the newest and most prestigious five star resorts in the enchanting Emerald Coast of Sardinia. The village of Porto Cervo is the most luxurious holiday destinations in Europe founded by Prince Karim Aga Khan IV who laid the foundation stone for this outstanding area of “Costa Smeralda” together with the beer millionaire Patrick Guinness in the 1960’s.
