Varese – There’s the famous shot of the Empire State Building from dusk to dawn, and there it is Kissthe sequencing of kisses exchanged by heterosexual and homosexual couples.
And then the portraits of celebrities, a corpus of works and materials relating to publishing and the graphics of record covers, private drawings and the first advertising sketches from the 1950s.
A color thread woven by characters such as Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mao Tsê-tung, the famous series Ladies and Gentlemenand then the album covers, from those dedicated to classical music and jazz of the forties and fifties to the famous album covers of the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones, runs from the MA*GA – Museum of Art of Gallarate (Varese) to the Milan gate of Milan Malpensa airport.
From January 22 to June 18, over 200 iconic works arriving from international institutions such as The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Ronald Nameth archive celebrate Warhol’s universe, from the first drawings made for publishing and fashion, to the famous pop works featuring musicians, politicians, famous designers, actors, commercial brands.

MA*GA Museum, Gallarate

The exhibition curated by Maurizio Vanni and Emma Zanella, entitled Andy Warhol. Serial Identity – to underline how much the research of the father of Pop Art is characterized by extreme versatility and the desire for transformation – will open with a comparison between some private drawings and the first advertising sketches. Famous cycles such as i Flowersthe Campbell’s Soupi Death & Disasters will complement the works related to publishing and disc cover graphics, while the viewer will be invited to grasp aspects such as the search for ever-changing identities that the artist wanted to give of himself, as well as the relationships between his work and the world of music, publishing, cinematography.

The five episodes of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, American talk show hosted by the artist for the iconic Andy Warhol TV, aired from 1985 to 1987, and the three video clips from 1981 for Saturday Night Live, America’s most famous TV show, the tops of the work Warholian television. This section will be further expanded at Porta di Milano – Milan Malpensa Airport, thanks to SEA, with a large video wall dedicated to Andy Warhol TV and a spectacular installation inspired by the artist’s most famous images.

Andy Warhol TV Productions, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, 1985, Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of the Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

On the occasion of the Gallarate exhibition, the video installation by the American photographer and director Ronald Nameth, born of the performance, will be exhibited for the first time in Italy Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a mix of Pop art, psychedelia and underground culture orchestrated by Warhol with the rock of the Velvet Underground and Nico. The show, a sort of ante litteram media mix performance, staged from April 1966 to May of the following year in various American cities, saw Warhol manipulate the lights and images in the environment, to experiment and recreate a psychedelic environment immersive as the Velvet Underground and Nico performed live acting as a mobile medium for film and slide projections with various images and colors.

Read also:
• Andy Warhol. Serial Identity