Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again – SFMOMA

Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; jointly owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art; gift of Ethel Redner Scull; © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.

Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again – SFMOMA The SFMOMA in San Francisco presents the exhibition ‘Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again’. May 19 through September 2, 2019.]]>

Source: SFMOMA

Spanning the artist’s 40-year career and featuring more than 300 works on three different floors of the museum, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, graphics, photographs, films, television shows as well as a personal time capsule of ephemera. The retrospective features examples of the artist’s most iconic pieces in addition to lesser-known abstract paintings from later in his career. Uncannily relevant in today’s image-driven world, “Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again” provides new insight into Andy Warhol himself by examining the complexities of this enigmatic artist more than 30 years after his death in 1987. The show’s title is taken from Warhol’s 1975 book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)”, a memoir featuring the artist’s musings on fame, love, beauty, class, money and other key themes that frequently appear in his work.

“He’s a complicated figure and a complicated artist,” said Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. “His inner emotions, his psychic self were not his subject matter. Warhol is constantly labeled a Pop artist, but all that happened within a couple of years and then he moved on and the work goes quite dark and explores questions of gender and sexual identity, fame, subcultures. At the time of his death, the consensus was that Warhol was no longer relevant. But the last major retrospective in 1989 was a wake-up call: this is an artist we have to reckon with.”

Related content

‘Andy Warhol: Prints’ at High Museum of Art (exhibition, 2017)