Andy Warhol and the Celebrity Cult

Gallery Talk with Associate Curator Rebecca Hart

Friday, November 23

7:00pm

7:30  Reception

To register for this event please go to http://andywarholffff.eventbrite.com

Andy Warhol’s obsession with celebrity manifested itself in many ways and is most revealing in his self-portraits. This 1986 version presents the artist as spectral: his neon blue head, shock of hair, and paint splatter appear as a disembodied, free-floating mask or scull. Made at a time when many of Warhol’s friends were dying of AIDS this canvas was considered a harbinger of death. David Bourdon, a friend, critic, and one-time studio assistant commented that these works are “a memento mori, an unblinking, unsentimental view of a hurriedly approaching mortality.” The DIA is fortunate to have a magnificent painting from the rejected series on loan from The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, while our two iconic Self-portraits (1967) are at the Metropolitan Museum as the signature works in the exhibition Considering Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years. The 1986 Warhol self-portrait will be on view through April 2013. Contemporary curator Rebecca Hart will discuss the 1986 “fright wig” self-portrait, Warhol’s cult of celebrity and his sense of mortality