Palazzo Albergati: Warhol&Friends. New York negli anni 80

Visit: Palazzo Albergati, Via Saragozza 28, 40123 Bologna Italy

Surrounded by tales of excess, transgression and the beautiful people, the protagonists of the liveliest artistic climate in ever-new New York, names such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons, will be on show from 29 Septembre with 150 works at Palazzo Albergati in Bologna in Warhol&Friends. New York negli anni ’80.

With the start of the eighties came the election of former actor Ronald Reagan to President of the United States; the economy became all about finance and the accumulation of unimagined wealth; John Lennon was killed on his doorstep on 8 December 1980; the New York stock exchange collapsed, as did the Berlin Wall; the events of Tienanmen Square took place, www was invented and the Aids crisis raged across the USA.

In a brief span of time the art world lost, among others, Keith Haring and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, while Basquiat died of a drug overdose.

Among the protagonists of the music scene, photography and cinema, were Edo Bertoglio, the Swiss photographer and maker of the documentary Downtown 81 with Basquiat, the French artist Maripol who was the stylist for Madonna’s Like a Virgin album, and Nan Goldin with her stories of everyday life. Neo-expressionist painting found its way into the big SoHo galleries and tied in with the experiences of its Italian counterpart the Transavanguardia with Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia. Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Robert Longo formed the superstar triad in American painting. In the nineties they would also try their hand at making films.

Too often described as the decade of disenchantment and superficiality, the eighties had a particular way of being political in an explosion of colours and figures where art is not merely visual experience. In a decade that saw art, music, cinema and literature combined – at a time when galleries and the international market declared the resounding success of a return to painting – they came to Bologna to tell the story of this unique period of upheaval: Warhol, Haring with Untitled (1983), Schnabel with Dunciad (Trances of Bouboul) from 1983, Koons with Art Magazine Ads (1989), Basquiat with Untitled (1983) and Bertoglio with Grace Jones and Madonna (1983), to mention just a few.

The 36 works and 38 polaroids on display show Andy Warhol in the very early eighties back at the centre of the artistic and social life of New York creating some of the most interesting series in the show such as Shoes, Hammer & Sickle, Camouflage, Lenin, Joseph Beuys, Vesuvius, and Knives.

Through advertising and consumer goods (from Duty Free to Levi’s Jeans) the new Andy looks more closely at how communication works in the media, thus bringing him closer to the new generation of young artists of the eighties who saw him as forerunner and guru.

By transforming the fetishes of the American collective imagination into art and anticipating the power of the mass media, Warhol turned the celebrities of the star system and the symbols of consumerism into icons: Liza Minelli, Marilyn Monroe and Mao alongside Campbell’s Soup, Brillo Boxes and the Dollar. They are all on display at the exhibition in Bologna.

Warhol&Friends. New York negli anni ’80 has been produced and organized by Gruppo Arthemisia and curated by Luca Beatrice with the support of Regione Emilia Romagna and the Comune di Bologna.