Between stories of excess, transgression and worldliness, the protagonists of the lively artistic atmosphere of an ever-new New York like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons, with about 150 works from 29 September will be at Palazzo Albergati in Bologna in the Warhol & Friends exhibition. New York in the 80s.
The 80s opened with the election of former actor Ronald Reagan as President of the United States; the economy is transformed into finance and accumulated unimaginable wealth; John Lennon dies killed under his home on December 8, 1980; the New York Stock Exchange collapses and also the Berlin Wall; the facts of piazza Tienanmen, the invention of the www and the dropping of AIDS in the USA.
Within a short time, art loses, among others, Keith Haring, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe while Basquiat dies destroyed by drugs.
Among the protagonists of the music, photography and cinema scene, the Ticinese Edo Bertoglio, photographer and author of the documentary film Downtown 81 played by Basquiat, the French artist Maripol who creates the artwork for Madonna’s Like a Virgin album Nan Goldin with his stories of everyday life. Neo-expressionist painting finds space in the great SoHo galleries and relates to the experiences of the Italian Transavanguardia with Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia. Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Robert Longo form the triad of superstars of American painting, which in the 90s will also be measured with the cinema.
Beds too often as the decade of disenchantment and superficiality, the ’80s have their own way of doing politics in an explosion of colors and figures where art is not just a visual experience.
To tell the unrepeatable ferment of a decade that has seen combining art, music, cinema and literature – in the moment in which galleries and the international market decree the resounding success of the return to painting – Warhol arrives in Bologna, Haring with Untitled (1983), Schnabel with Dunciad (Trances of Bouboul) of 1983, Koons with Art Magazine Ads (1989), Basquiat with Untitled (1983) and Bertoglio with Grace Jones and Madonna (1983), just to name a few.
In the exhibition with 36 works and 38 polaroids Andy Warhol at the beginning of the ’80s returns to the center of the artistic and social life of New York realizing some of his most interesting cycles on show like Shoes, Hammer & Sickle, Camouflage, Lenin , Joseph Beuys, Vesuvius, Knives.
Between advertising, trade, consumer goods – from Duty Free to Levi’s Jeans – the new Andy looks even more at the way of communication and media, thus approaching the new generation of young artists of the ’80s who saw in him an anticipation , a real guru.
By transforming the fetishes of the American collective imagination into art and anticipating the establishment of the power of the mass media, Warhol made icons of the star system characters and the symbols of consumerism: Liza Minelli, Marilyn Monroe and Mao next to Campbell’s Soup, Brillo Boxes and Dollar, all on display in Bologna.
Under the patronage of the Emilia Romagna Region and the Municipality of Bologna, the exhibition Warhol & Friends. New York in the 80s is produced and organized by the Arthemisia Group and curated by Luca Beatrice.
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Tel. 051 030141 (active from Monday to Friday from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm)
Opening time
Every day from 10.00 to 20.00 (the ticket office closes one hour earlier)
Special openings
1 November 10.00 – 20.00
8 December 10.00 – 20.00
24 December 10.00 – 17.00
December 25 16.00 – 20.00
26 December 10.00 – 20.00
31 December 10.00 – 17.00
1 January 10.00 – 20.00
6 January 10.00 – 20.00
Tickets
Full with audio guide € 15.00
Full € 14.00
Reduced with audio guide € 13.00
Reduced € 12.00
