GAMeC – Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

Andy Warhol: The Multiplied Work: Warhol and After Warhol
Pamela Rosenkranz: Alien Culture
May 6–July 30, 2017

GAMeC – Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo
Italy

www.gamec.it

Andy Warhol: The Multiplied Work: Warhol and After Warhol
Curator: Giacinto Di Pietrantonio

Unlike many exhibitions dedicated to Andy Warhol, the GAMeC installation aims to reawaken the flow of vital energy that distinguished the artist, with a narrative that spotlights the very nature of his corpus: the singularity of being multiple, reproducible, enduring over time, and the ability to devise a new reading of the relationship between “unauthorized” and “authentic”—the crux of the exhibition.

In the four exhibition rooms—lined with tin foil, like The Factory—famous screen-prints of political figures (Lenin, Mao Zedong), artists (Joseph Beuys, Man Ray), and personalities from the world of film, music and sport (Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger, Cassius Clay-Muhammad Ali) share space with several acetates, as well as album covers (including the famous The Velvet Underground & Nico, or the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers), magazines and cult items, like Mick Jagger’s guitar signed by the artist and all of the band.

There is also an emblematic extract from Warhol’s foray into films: Empire (1964), the famous slow-motion feature of New York’s Empire State Building, still of interest to countless people and inspiration for artists, it has justly earned the title of “multiplied work."

The works produced by Warhol are displayed—perhaps with a hint of provocation—alongside those executed after his death, and while these are neither authorized nor officially recognized, they continue to feed the legend and the market, also pursuing that process of mass consumption initiated by the artist himself. The exhibition offers no opinion on the legitimacy of these posthumous works but does intend to underscore their existence and perhaps they may be considered part of the Warhol legacy.

The exhibition catalogue is published by GAMeC Books and alongside text by curator, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, a series of testimonies from over 60 Italian and international artists who have exhibited at GAMeC over the years, reveals how they see Warhol’s legacy to the art world and the field of communication.

Pamela Rosenkranz: Alien Culture
Curators: Sara Fumagalli and Stefano Raimondi

GAMeC presents a new solo show by the artist Pamela Rosenkranz (1979, Uri, Switzerland; lives and works in Zurich).

This site specific project refers to the spiritual history of the building that hosts GAMeC—a former convent, whose arched windows the artist has mirrored with replicas which radiate a solid RGB blue. The bright LEDs that shine through the seven Alien Blue Windows produce a spatial experience that is strikingly visual, evoking both a primordial ocean, and symbolic skies prominent in much religious imagery. Consisting of backlit, imageless screens, this new series is a hybrid of paintings and light installation. The immersive environment it produces evokes a digital hue prevalent on the Internet, which here generates an experience that is both spiritual and sensual, thus transcending color’s physicality. As it permeates the Spazio Zero, the intense blue light recreates the view from a window opening onto artificial skies where allegory and technology intertwine.

The light installation is complemented by a new series of paintings entitled Creation, Deterioration, Conservation. These further the artist’s engagement with Renaissance painting, which she first developed when she was researching her work Our Product for the Venice Biennale in 2015. The basis of this series is Gentile Bellini’s Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo (c. 1500), a tableau that depicts the holy relic being rescued from Venetian waters. The artist has worked from reproductions of Bellini’s original painting, which she found through a Google Images search. Layers of transparent, flesh colored paint are applied to prints from these files, producing a three-dimensional and transparent “skin” of pigments and polymers. The color of the paint refers to the Central European skin tone—a color the artist has used in earlier works such as her iconic branded water bottles and her 2015 Venice Biennale installation, for which she filled the main space with a pale, pink, thick liquid.

Catalogue published by GAMeC Books. 
The exhibition is part of a series in honour of Arturo Toffetti.