ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative

From September 25, 2020, mumok will devote three exhibitions to the phenomenon that is Andy Warhol. Along with well-known classics, mumok will present rarely shown works and look behind the facade of the world-famous Pop Art icon to rediscover Warhol’s capabilities as a groundbreaking exhibition curator and installation artist.

With two shows—ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative and DEFROSTING THE ICEBOX. Guesting at mumok: The Hidden Treasures of the Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Weltmuseum Wien—mumok presents the very first exemplary overview of the polymath artist’s exhibition practices without letting his early and late works fall by the wayside. This broad cross section opens new perspectives on the myriad media Warhol used and shows that his modes of presentation should be understood as an essential part of his oeuvre.

The related collection exhibition, MISFITTING TOGETHER. Serial Formations of Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art faces the challenge not only of situating Warhol in the field of Pop Art but of painting a more nuanced picture of the times by including works of Minimal and Conceptual Art. Juxtaposing these movements will show how strongly they have influenced each other and how hard it is to pigeonhole them art-historically.

ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative peeks behind the artist’s aforementioned public image, placing aspects of Warhol’s cosmos at center stage that have thus far gone virtually unexamined. Two sides of his “dual persona”—the much-quoted, staged persona on the one hand and the hidden one, barely noticed by the public, on the other—will be contrasted: The exhibition deals with Warhol’s curatorial intentions and prevailing motifs and abstractions of the 1950s.

The selected works illustrate Warhol’s early immersion in iconographically clearly defined series—especially his interest in gender performance variations as well as the development of a specific visual vocabulary that keeps cropping up in various contexts. Given the disclosure of this system, Andy Warhol’s early works can no longer be pigeonholed as “commercial.” The spotlight will also be turned on Warhol’s exhibition practices from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, concentrating on presenting individual work series in different media. This addresses the densely interwoven nature of the artist’s work and mode of presentation.

A comprehensive academic compendium will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, including texts by Marianne Dobner, Naoko Kaltschmidt, Natalie Musteata, Neil Printz, Nina Schleif, and Jennifer Sichel, who approach Warhol’s rich exhibition history in a variety of ways.

DEFROSTING THE ICEBOX. Guesting at mumok: The Hidden Treasures of the Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Weltmuseum Wien
The exhibition RAID THE ICEBOX 1 with Andy Warhol is seen as one of the earliest examples of a collection exhibition curated by an artist. Warhol worked with the holdings of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and conceived a traveling exhibition, which opened in 1969 at the Institute for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, continued at the Isaac Delgado Museum in New Orleans in 1970, and finally returned to its point of origin, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Though the Warhol-curated exhibition did not feature any works by the artist himself, it contained several presentation strategies that broke with traditional museum standards: Instead of prioritizing the visual arts, Warhol exhibited the applied arts. Instead of applying a classification system of chronology, medium, or style, he presented the objects in an ahistorical, nonhierarchical form. The museum storage became an exhibition; what had almost been forgotten was placed in the limelight. Following Warhol’s curatorial principles, mumok takes this exhibition as an occasion to implement those unusual presentation strategies in so important a historic collection as that of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

In keeping with Warhol’s motto of “raiding the icebox,” mumok will devote an entire level to the Antiques Collection’s and Weltmuseum Wien’s storages.

MISFITTING TOGETHER. Serial Formations of Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art
“I was reflecting that most people thought the Factory was a place where everybody had the same attitudes about everything; the truth was, we were all odds-and-ends misfits, somehow misfitting together.” (Andy Warhol)

Andy Warhol’s titular words serve as the starting point for the third exhibition. Referencing Mel Bochner’s Artforum article “The Serial Attitude” (1967), the collection show explores the serial order as a link of all three art movements. As Bochner already stated in 1967, serial arrangement is a method, not a style. Seriality should be understood not as formalized playfulness but as artistic strategy with clearly defined underlying processes, often from the fields of mathematics and language.

It is hardly a secret that aside from being a phenomenon of Warhol’s times, the concept of seriality also played a crucial role in his work. Instead of one final result, it was the steadily changing process that was at the heart of Warhol’s serial concept. A similar method can be seen in works of contemporaries.

Artists: Lutz Bacher, Alighiero Boetti, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Heinz Gappmayr, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Dóra Maurer, Claes Oldenburg, Friederike Pezold, Larry Poons, Charlotte Posenenske, Peter Roehr, Robert Smithson, Daniel Spoerri, Andy Warhol

Curated by Marianne Dobner, co-curated by Naoko Kaltschmidt (MISFITTING TOGETHER)

The exhibitions were supported by the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation.

Contact
Please check our website for regular updates on our program.
For further information please contact: Katharina Murschetz
T +43 (0) 1 52500 1400 / press@mumok.at