It's difficult to talk about Andy Warhol's work without a chronic over-use of the word “iconic" and that's certainly true of the exhibition of works from the Hall Collection currently showing at the Ashmolean.
Everything seems to be iconic of something – the 60s, the 70s; America, Hollywood; Michael Caine, Bob Dylan, Chairman Mao, 'The American Man'; even flowers. The curious thing is that, despite many of these works being half a century old and very much of their time, they still manage to be fresh, vibrant and eternally young.
One of Warhol's best known techniques was to create silk screen masks from photographs and make multiple prints, generating images that are both mass-produced and, due to natural variations in the printing process, unique - a process that the artist described as “quick and chancy". These prints form the first part of this exhibition. Most are portraits with a mixture of large repeated images hung together as series, as in 'The American Man', and grouped together like a sheet of postage stamps as in his famous 1970s work based an iconic image of Chairman Mao. The 1960s pictures also include some of the flower prints that were displayed in an interesting juxtaposition with some of William Morris's wallpaper designs (another form of repetitive printing) in Modern Art Oxford's 'Love is Enough' exhibition in 2014.
The 1970s works are dominated by iconic pop-art portraits of films stars and other famous people, reflecting Warhol's lifelong fascination with what we would now call 'celebrity culture', but other works include a set of green nebulae which turn out to be created through the action of urine on metallic paint. And finally, the stark black and white works of his final year, including a detail of 'The Last Supper' – perhaps the most iconic image of all.
This isn't a large exhibition and anyone hoping for a blockbuster is likely to be disappointed. It is, however a highly accessible introduction to Warhol and his world.
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