Andy Warhol, ‘Shadows’, 1978–79, detail view. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.
This time last year Calvin Klein announced their partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation, allowing the company to use the inimitable artist’s artwork throughout their collections and campaigns until 2020. So the iconic purveyor of the Pop art movement meets the quintessentially American brand? It’s quite literally a match made in Americana heaven. Warhols have been popping up on everything from t-shirts to underpants since Raf Simon’s killer Calvin Klein 205W39NYC SS18 collection, which featured prints of Electric Chair, Ambulance Disaster, Five Deaths On Turquoise alongside paparazzi portraits of ex-Interview CEO Sandra Brant and actor Dennis Hopper. As the models walked on a pop-corn covered catwalk, the corrugated iron barn-like set of the AW18 show was plastered with the artist’s photographs. And jeans, denim jackets, t-shirts and shoes were printed with the art’s spiky haired self-portraits for a CK Jeans capsule collection.
This month, following conservation work supported by the brand, Warhol’s abstract series Shadows will return to New York for exhibition in a specially built streetfront gallery space at Calvin’s Klein, Inc.’s headquarters on 205 West 39th Street. Presented by the Dia Art Foundation, the works will be exhibited concurrently with the artist’s upcoming traveling retrospective, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, which opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in November, before moving to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in spring and the Art Institute of Chicago in autumn 2019.
Andy Warhol with ‘Shadows’ (1978–79) at Heiner Friedrich Gallery, 393 West Broadway, New York, in 1979. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Arthur Tess. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.
The immersive series of a colossal 102 silkscreened and hand-painted canvases, produced by a 50 year-old Warhol and his Factory entourage in 1978-79, have not been shown in New York since they were exhibited in the late 1990s at Dia’s then location in Chelsea. “Andy Warhol was among the original group of artists championed by Dia in the 1970s, and the depth and duration of the relationship lead to Dia’s acquisition of over two hundred works by the artist as well as the eventual gift in the 1990s of the majority of these works for the creation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh,” explains Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director, Jessica Morgan. “This exhibition marks the first time in twenty years that visitors will be able to experience the work in New York City, where it made its debut, before it returns to Dia:Beacon [in the summer of 2019]. Placed within the broader context of Dia’s programming and the creative continuum of Warhol’s work on view at the Whitney, we hope this presentation will shed new light on one of the artist’s most complex and remarkable works.”
Andy Warhol’s ‘Shadows’ is on display from 26th October-15th December 15 2018, at 205 West 39th Street, Calvin Klein, Inc.’s headquarters, New York.
Andy Warhol, Shadows, 1978–79. Installation view, Dia Center for the Arts, 545 West 22nd Street, New York, 1998–99.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Cathy Carver. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.
