Andy Warhol. Late Works

About

Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He is the precise observer who exposed the illusion of individuality and showed us the harmony of our images of life.

Warhol's late works also evoke a formal language of the "myths of everyday life" (Roland Barthes), template-like images of the consciousness industry and the power of commodity consumption from everyday American culture: an identity-forming image from a time in which the era of digital and social media is reflected between art and life emerged. For Warhol, everything became the surface of an apparent utopia in which sender and receiver exchange analog messages. In his cool agnosticism of appearances, he processes the news from a neurotic flood of images.

Starting from everyday reproductions, newspaper articles and advertisements, Warhol transforms the pictorial objects he appropriates by enlarging, hatching and fragmenting them in his drawings. The painterly gesture of the forms and the use of ink and acrylic paint on paper, creating strong black-and-white contrasts, lead Warhol to the boundaries between painting and drawing. Many years after creating early works in a 'blotted line' technique and the accentuated outline drawings of his artistic beginnings, he found a new freedom of expression beyond screen printing.

»Andy Warhol. Late Works" is the first exhibition at Galerie Bastian that is exclusively dedicated to the artist's late work, the last decade of his oeuvre, which is shown in an exemplary selection of works. The exhibition opens on the occasion of the Gallery Weekend Berlin 2024.