Andy Warhol is coming to Mons

[Steven_Draker]

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ANDY WARHOL. LIFE, DEATH AND BEAUTY 5 Oct 2013 – 19 Jan 2014

 

This exhibition at the BAM explores the lesser-known connection Andy Warhol always had with spirituality and religion, through the artist’s pictures. His body of work continues to oscillate between life, death and beauty. The revelation of this hidden piety transforms our perception of an artist who managed to fool the world by making us believe that his only obsessions were money, celebrity and glamour.

 

The exhibition leads the visitor through “Warholian” icons of the “beauty-success-power” trinity. From the early 1960s, portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Mao Zedong entered the pop artist’s iconographic register. Warhol went on to develop his process of treating printed images in different silk-screen versions produced by his colleagues. As well as the “iconic” illustrations, other works by Warhol such as “Crosses”, “Gun” and “Knives”, clearly portray death as the recurring, even obsessive, theme. A few fascinating self-portraits also combine the image of the artist with a skull. This tension between life and death runs right through the “Disaster” and “Suicides” series as well as in “Electric chair”, a modern instrument of torture, not unlike the Cross. During the last decade of his life, the artist broadened his horizons to produce his own personal interpretations of masterpieces of classic art history, such as Botticelli’s Venus and Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation.

 

With a total of around 130 pieces (including paintings, silkscreen prints and photographs), the exhibition also includes works from a number of Belgian private collectors.

 

on the web: http://www.bam.mons.be

 

I have visited the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh a few years back and I'm looking forward to seeing this new exhibition in Mons next weekend.