There’s a historical tendency to present events in a neat, linear fashion. However, contrary to accepted notions, Warhol, who amassed fashionable clients such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Tiffany and Co. as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, didn’t just wake up at the dawn of a new decade as a central figure in pop art.
Says exhibition curator Nicholas Chambers, “He actually continued producing commercial work in the vein of his 1950s output until at least 1965.” And it is this grey area between historical dates and professions that underpins Adman: Warhol Before Pop. The exhibition, opening at the AGNSW in February, gathers some 300 objects from the Andy Warhol Museum in Warhol’s city of birth, Pittsburgh. Drawings, photographs and artists’ books reveal that along with his immensely successful commercial art career, Warhol was concurrently working and exhibiting as an emerging artist.
“We’re particularly excited to be exhibiting numerous objects that have never before been placed on public display,” says Chambers, this includes sketchbooks and works from Warhol’s debut exhibition, previously only available for scrutiny by researchers at the museum. Of particular note are his works that use his inventive blotted line technique, and early stamped compositions that are precursors to his silk-screen printing.
Interest in Warhol is near inexhaustible. Subsequent generations find new avenues to the artist through his rapacious appetite for all manner of artistic expression – music, publishing, filmmaking, fashion, painting and design. Warhol viewed art in its potential to be inclusive of all forms. “He crafted a practice that moved fluidly between different creative pursuits,” says Chambers.
Adman: Warhol Before Pop
Art Gallery of New South Wales
25 February – 28 May
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
Now showing at Home of the Arts (HOTA), the sophomore Gold Coast Triennial, Here and Now, brings together 42 contemporary artists to represent the depth and dynamism of the city’s artistic community.
The National Gallery of Victoria has announced the next instalment of the Winter Masterpieces series, coming in June 2025, will be a return to French Impressionism—an exhibition from 2021 that closed as soon as it opened due to the global pandemic.
Even though women currently outnumber men in the arts by two-to-one, the industry remains rife with gender disparities from income to accommodating motherhood. So why, asks Neha Kale, is the growing visibility of female-identifying artists falling short of genuine, material change?
