At the Gallerie d'Italia in Naples, the exhibition entitled “Andy Warhol. Triple Elvis” curated by Luca Massimo Barbero has been extended until May 4.
The exhibition was a great success with the public and critics and features an exhibition focus on Andy Warhol's works, including three fundamental graphic cycles brought together for the first time and coming from the Luigi and Peppino Agrati collection, an important collection of contemporary art formed between the 1960s and 1980s and incorporated, thanks to the bequest of Cavalier Luigi Agrati, into the historical and artistic heritage protected and promoted by Intesa Sanpaolo.
The exhibition aims to present itself as a dossier exhibition, which intends to tell the story of Warhol's original and extraordinary artistic research starting from the work 'Triple Elvis' of 1963, the year in which the artist worked for the first time on the repetition of the image on the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to the Elvis Paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
It was in those years that the artist began to include in his works characters that he himself, ahead of his time, defined as famous.
At the same time, it is possible to see the evolution of the American artist in the Sixties and early Seventies, through three important graphic cycles exhibited here: Marilyn, Mao Tse- Tung and Electric Chairs.
The exhibition opens with two cycles of graphic works, the series of ten silkscreen prints Electric Chairs where the image of an electric chair becomes a political icon, but also a meditation on humanity and death, and the 10 silkscreen prints in which the artist, through the decisive use of color, shows the portrait of Mao, made in 1972, the year of President Nixon's famous trip to China. In the same room there is another series from 1967, dedicated to Marilyn, which consecrates the great firmament of Hollywood myths, which have become an emblem of the American artist.
Also on display is a portrait of Warhol, a small and delicate photographic work by Duane Michals, an American photographer in which the artist appears and disappears.
This refined exhibition concludes with two pieces from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, the two Vesuvius, as a testimony to the important bond that the artist had not only with the city of Naples, but with Italy.
The exhibition is part of the project “Vitality of Time”, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, to explore previously unseen aspects of the bank's collections, and part of the cycle are the six rooms set up on the second floor of the Gallerie d'Italia in Naples, where it is possible to admire works by artists from the late 1940s to the 1990s, including Fontana, Kounellis, Boetti and Sol Lewitt.
