The project Andy Warhol is a collaboration with Act, a Sao Paolo-based art advisory firm that operates globally in various aspects of the art world, contributing to multiple curatorial initiatives and special projects. Its clients are collectors, artists, foundations and not-for-profit institutions.
For the first time in Brazil, over 50 rare photographs by Andy Warhol will be showcased from the period 1973 to 1987. The show represents a unique opportunity to learn more about Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) artistic process, his use of photography as both source material and finished artworks.
From early Polaroids to black-and-white silver gelatin prints, the works feature portraits of Warhol’s friends: icons of the effervescent culture of the time, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Grace Jones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Steven Spielberg, and Tina Turner. Also included are a group of Andy Warhol’s seminal self-portraits. In addition to the portraits, photographs representing objects such as shoes and bananas, along with stitched photographic collages will be featured.
In the 1970s, Andy Warhol brought his camera with him everywhere he went to document his life and interests. First using a Polaroid and then a 35-millimeter compact Minox, he created a photographic language and unique visual vocabulary.
Warhol’s visual language owes an enormous amount to photography. There have always been photos behind nearly his entire body of work. As source material, Warhol used found photos clipped from newspapers or Hollywood publicity stills featuring subjects such as Marlilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jackie O, and Marlon Brando, for example.
Throughout the 1960s, when Warhol first gained recognition, photography was given scant regard as anything other than a commercial art form. It was at this time that photography was explored by some of the most notable artists of that decade - including John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha – the beginnings of the medium becoming a relevant tool for various artistic explorations. However, no other artist of his era used the camera so comprehensively and in so many applications as did Warhol.
In fact, Warhol’s photographic work remains one of the most central and long-lasting aspects of his creative process, which covered his entire career and was split by various photographic genres: Photobooth Strips, Polaroid photos,silver gelatin prints, collages, stitched photos and, of course, films.
The importance of Andy Warhol’s contribution to contemporary art and pop culture through numerous mediums he had produced is undeniable; however, at the heart of it all, it is in the photographs where one finds the essence of this iconic artist. As Warhol himself reported in his diary: “I didn’t believe in art; I believed in photography.”
The photos in the exhibition were amassed by a single collector, James Hedges, over the course of 25 years whose commitment to Warhol’s photographic oeuvre is singular in the world, having amassed the world’s largest private collection of Warhol photos.
According to Hedges, one of his favorite series is the Polaroids called Sex Parts and Torsos, the former being sexually explicit shots and the latter being more classical in nature. Among the Sex Parts and Torsos included in the show, there is a work featuring Jean- Michel Basquiat, in addition to anonymous subjects. This body of work is one of the artist’s most enthusiastic engagements and has both a highly formalistic approach but also often comical.
Another standout in the exhibition includes a photo collage featuring fashion designer Jean Paul Gauthier. Warhol was hired by French Vogue in 1984 as a guest editor to create a series of collages and layouts which were utilized in the magazine.
The breadth and importance of Warhol’s photographic oeuvre cannot be underestimated, and this exhibition represents the first in-depth study of the artist’s work.
“A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary“