Andy Warhol "Ladies and Gentlemen"
Skarstedt Gallery
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Skarstedt Gallery presents a selection of paintings and drawings from Andy Warhol’s series, Ladies and Gentlemen, created in 1975.
This exhibition is comprised of nineteen paintings and seven drawings and represents some of the most interesting portraits Warhol created while also depicting Warhol’s acute awareness of the modernizing and liberalizing world around him.
Unlike the portraits commissioned by socialites and celebrities, Warhol paid these sitters to pose in front of his camera. In a statement made by Vincent Freemont about the sitters he says, “Bob Colacello found most of them at a club called the Gilded Grape. After the photo session, I would hand the subjects a model release and a check and send them over to the bank.” The cross-dressers were invited to pose and dress as they wished while Warhol took their portraits with his Polaroid Big Shot camera, the same process he used with the Hollywood starlets and socialites. The photographs were then sent to a commercial silkscreen shop where they were transferred onto the silk or silk-like fabric and then returned to Warhol for printing. These paintings are glamorous and feminine, and mimic the celebrity status of his other portraits. To Warhol, the Ladies and Gentlemen were starlets but their ambiguity and anonymity veered these paintings away from the commerciality with which his work was once affiliated.
Where Warhol’s paintings are sometimes scrutinized for his aptitude in fine art, his drawings are a comprehensive display of his artistic talent. The seven on view are great examples of this seemingly “forgotten” talent. In another essay published in 2001, Vincent Freemont states, “Most people took Andy’s quote about wanting to be a machine with minimal human contact with his painting literally. This was one of the provocative conceptual thoughts he tossed out to see how people would react.”
[Image: Andy Warhol "Ladies and Gentlemen" (1975) Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 50 x 40 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 17, 2009 to October 24, 2009