Andy Warhol – Late Works

Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He is the precise observer who debunked the illusion of individuality and made us aware of the uniformity of our images of life.

Warhol’s late works also evoke an artistic language of the »myths of everyday life« (Roland Barthes), template-like images of the consciousness industry and the power of commodity consumption from everyday American culture: identity-forming images from a time in which the era of digital and social media became a reflection between art and life. For Warhol, everything became the surface of an apparent utopia in which sender and receiver exchange analogue messages. In his cool agnosticism of appearances, he processed the messages from a neurotic flood of images.

Based on reproductions, newspaper articles and adverts, Warhol transforms the pictorial objects he appropriates by enlarging, hatching and fragmenting them in his drawings. The painterly gesture of the forms and the use of ink and acrylic paint on paper to create strong black and white contrasts take Warhol to the boundaries between painting and drawing. Many years after creating early works in a ›blotted line‹ technique and the accentuated outline drawings of his artistic beginnings, he found a new freedom of expression beyond screen printing.

»Andy Warhol. Late Works« is the first exhibition at Bastian gallery dedicated exclusively to the artist’s late work, the last decade of his oeuvre, which is shown in an exemplary selection of works. The exhibition opens on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2024.