Andy Warhol: Subject and Seriality

Andy Warhol is arguably one of the most iconic artists of his time. Mention his name and soup cans, Coke bottles, Mao and Marilyn immediately come to mind. By making the production of art inseparable from its marketing, Warhol helped transform popular culture into an art movement. Yet, because his work is so accessible and recognizable, its complexity and sophistication often elude.

To bring that complexity into focus, the Neuberger Museum of Art has organized Andy Warhol: Subject and Seriality, a new exhibition opening on July 22, in which Warhol’s method of repeating images of his subjects in various and multiple ways – concurrently and across time, and in diverse media – is explored. Included are the artist’s prints, photographs, and multiples, created between the 1960s and 1980s, that come from the Neuberger Museum of Art’s own collection and those of four other Hudson Valley museums, and various galleries and foundations. The exhibition is the last of a collaborative effort known as Warhol x 5 in which the five museums each examined unique aspects of the artist’s iconic approach to his subject matter.

 The exhibition will feature over 40 works that include images of Jacqueline Kennedy; Marilyn Monroe; Janet Villella (Warhol’s close friend and a ballerina with the New York City Ballet); and artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. The works are interesting as there are slight variations from print to print, and there can be differences between seriality and variation, even within the same print.

“As Warhol experimented across media throughout his career,” explains Ms. Shilkoff, “he activated the inherent properties of each medium to reconsider subjects through formal means. This synthesis of media and subject, these reiterations and cycles of subjects over years, show Warhol presenting a subject that becomes an object of memory, the mediation of memory, rendering his familiar work far more immediate and revolutionary.”