Andy Warhol Exhibition

09.01.15

Transmitting Andy Warhol is the first solo exhibition of Warhol’s work in the north of England, and aims to explore his experiments with mass-produced imagery, which he ‘transmitted’ back into the public realm.

The show features some of his most recognisable artworks, including his Campbell soup cans and Marilyn Monroe diptych, along with paintings, screenprints, adverts, record sleeves, photographs and video.

Andy Warhol would have been 86 in August. His soup cans and dollar bills, Coke bottles and Brillo boxes are more than half a century old. An entire generation has grown up with his Marilyns and Maos; primary school children know how to imitate his style and he is the most widely exhibited of all 20th-century artists. A new take on Warhol, therefore, ought to be a contradiction in terms.

The show opens with a Flowers work from 1964, based on a commercial photograph of a hibiscus multiplied by four and drenched with brilliant colour. Warhol stacked these prints so high and sold them so cheap that almost anyone could buy one – as he enthusiastically pointed out; of course the exact obverse now holds true. In those days he printed directly on to shopping bags, making art with utilitarian items, and he painted utilitarian items – airmail stamps, say – on linen so that they resembled fine art images.

Gun, 1981

That is a particular joy of this show, in fact: its close focus on graphic design, illustration, print-making and other mass-reproduction media allows one to see the fine distinctions between various versions of the same image. For the multiples that characterised Warhol’s art from beginning to end are almost invariably an exercise in compare and contrast. Here’s a handgun in moody grey, pushed safely back into the past; here it is again in ice white, its cold ferocity hitting into the present.

Elvis, literally printed on a silver screen, appears twice over and the size of life; but both stars are fading out and one is on the verge of total extinction. The electric chair, in misty blue, is a throne from some ancient culture or a hideous torture device in burning orange. It is the same object, the thing itself and yet somehow different each time – just like the Brillo boxes.

Warhol said everything he made was connected with death, but this show finds his humour too. The opening gallery – nothing less than a career condensed – is full of it, not least the wonderful sight gag of a vast painting-by-numbers picture. This is the very definition of art for all, a despised thing that anyone can make raised up into a seascape of grandeur and beauty, in which the numbers remain visible. The title repeats the point: Do It Yourself.

Do it yourself (seascape) 1962