Published: 19/03/2025
To celebrate its 25th Anniversary, MK Gallery is hosting "Andy Warhol: Portrait of America", an Artist Rooms Exhibition in partnership with the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland.
The exhibition features over 130 of Warhol's works starting from his personal and commercial work in the 1950s, going on to some of his well known pop art images and continuing until his death in the 1980s. The work on show holds up a mirror that both celebrates and critiques American society and its consumerism. It also reveals Warhol's inventiveness, breadth and creativity.
It is fascinating to see how Warhol struck out in a different direction from the abstract expressionism that dominated art as he began his career. He did not see a distinction between fine art and commercial art. For him, there was beauty and interest in the everyday.
As you go through the exhibtion, you can see his fascination with celebrities and other artists. There are works depicting Hockney, Gilbert and George and Mapplethorpe alongside self-portraits. There are also portraits of Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.
The exhibiton contrasts Warhol's fascination with death and the darker side of life with his love of celebrity. There are works preoccupied with mortality as exemplified by a series of silk-screen prints of an electric chair, a print showing skulls and two huge revolver prints. There are also a number of homoerotic images including an advert for Levis. Throughout, you are aware of his preoccupation with consumerism, nowhere more apparent than in the huge $ print.
Warhol was a prolific photographer and a nice touch in the exhibition is the inclusion of some of his "little red books" of photos. As shown with the portraits of Gilbert and George, you can see how he moved from photos to a final painted silk-screen image, a process he felt created a machine like and impersonal way of making art. Indeed photography was at the heart of his art.
The exhibition at MK Gallery is well worth a visit and is on until June 29th 2025.
Rob Bollington
