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 37 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.”
A curiosity aside is the origin of the photographs, which belong to a single collection that began to be composed gradually about 25 years ago by a collector passionate for Andy Warhol’s work, Jim Hedges.
Since his adolescence Hedges was an avid consumer of everything that referred to pop culture from the 1980s and New York, which quickly led him to discover the artist Andy Warhol. Warhol's first work that he acquired was a painting depicting the actress Marilyn Monroe in pink and black from the Reversal series.
Hedges grew up in a family that had been involved in art for generations, started collecting photographs when he was about 20 years old, at the time an unpopular segment and with lower values. He says that most of his collection consists of photographs and films by Andy Warhol, which are the origin of the vast majority of works created by the artist, as a way of narrating life and his creative process, for the collector “Without photography, there would be no Warhol ”.
The favorite works in his collection are the so-called stitched photographs, the most important and rare works created by Warhol and the height of his artistic production. For Hedges, his collection represents an investment, but it also reflects his passion for art and his constantly evolving and maturing eyes as a collector.
