Warhol, People and Things: 1972-2022

Warhol, People and Things: 1972–2022

Casa São Roque – Centro de Arte, 2019.

OFFSITE: IN PORTO, PORTUGAL

From May 21, 2022 through January 31, 2023 Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY) is partnering with the art center Casa São Roque in Porto, Portugal to present an extensive exhibition devoted to Andy Warhol and his influence on several generations of photographers, filmmakers, painters, musicians and multi-media artists.

Warhol, People and Things: 1972–2022 places Andy Warhol’s work and his contributions to the development of experimental art, media, and critical art discourse in conversation with contemporary artists, while also exposing the pioneering Pop artist to a new generation in Porto. The exhibition attempts to generate new possibilities for thinking about Warhol’s approach to image production and appropriation, commodity and icon fetishism, the social life of famous and marginalized people alike, and how the artist seamlessly moved between media throughout his career. The consequences of such thinking are further considered and contradicted through other artists’ responses.

A significant portion of the exhibition at Casa São Roque revolves around a collection of Warhol’s 38 Polaroids from 1972–1986 and 30 black and white gelatin silver prints from the 70s and 80s which were gifted to the Mishkin Gallery directly by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts through their Photographic Legacy Program to expand scholarship on his work. This is their debut in Portugal and their first time on view in Europe. The last major exhibition of Warhol’s work in Porto was the traveling exhibition Andy Warhol: A Factory at Serralves Museum in 2000, yet there is an entire generation of people in Porto who have never seen Warhol’s work locally until now.

As indicated in the title, the exhibition extends beyond Warhol and includes several new commissions. The exhibition is comprised of contemporary artworks that respond to and contradict ideas about Warhol and his collaborations. Rather than focus strictly on topics such as sequence and repetition, commercialism and ambition, queerness and fetishization of the body, and social networks, the exhibition is organized so that the viewer may fluidly approach any number of these topics in different ways through multiple artistic perspectives.

Included in the exhibition is Jonas Mekas’ cinematic portrait of Warhol in Scenes of the Life Of Andy Warhol (1982), John Miller’s Middle of the Day photographs, three films by Jeff Preiss including the new Welcome to Jordan (2022), Tony Cokes’ film essay on the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson Untitled (mj, the symptom) (2020), recent paintings by Anna Ostoya (2022), abstract Polaroids by Eileen Quinlan (2022), new commissions by Portuguese artists Sara Graça and Pedro Magalhães, and works from the Casa São Roque collection including photographs by Augusto Alves da Silva and Robert Mapplethorpe. Ephemeral materials such as newspaper articles, magazine covers, and publications related to Warhol’s work will also be included to add to the historical social and public understanding of the work.

Public programs will include a lecture by Portuguese photography scholar Susana Lourenço Marques (Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade do Porto) and a lecture by art historian Inesa Brasiske on the relationship between Warhol and Mekas.

Warhol, People and Things: 1972–2022 is co-curated by Alaina Claire Feldman (Director and Curator, Mishkin Gallery) and Barbara Piwowarska (Artistic Director, Casa São Roque).

A booklet with a text by the curators and a full exhibition checklist is available for download here.

Warhol, People and Things: 1972-2022, Installation view. Photo: Filipe Braga, 2022.

Warhol, People and Things: 1972-2022, Installation view. Photo: Filipe Braga, 2022.

Warhol, People and Things: 1972-2022, Installation view. Photo: Filipe Braga, 2022.

Anna Ostoya, Memorabilia, 2021/∞. Warhol, People and Things: 1972-2022, Installation view.

Warhol, People and Things: 1972-2022, Installation view. Photo: Filipe Braga, 2022.