The new exhibition season at the Galleria d’Arte Maggiore opens under the full banner of artistic and historical “responsibility.” A monographic show on and by Andy Warhol serves as the ideal pretext for weaving new hypertexts. On this occasion, the choice was made to display some of his fundamental works, while also highlighting a precise curatorial and exhibition intent. Exhibiting one of the fathers of twentieth-century Art History means venturing into the cultural labyrinth of each individual work on view, but also—and above all—retracing the past while observing the present and peeking toward the future.The two curators, Franco and Roberta Calarota, begin with the master of Pop Art driven by the need to trace the salient points of our visual and cultural past, fully aware of how a presence of such magnitude can nourish our present—both from the standpoint of critical inquiry and from the strictly commercial perspective. This, it must be added, should always be the task of a gallery committed simultaneously as a cultural agent and an economic actor.
A dynamic perfectly clear to the artist himself, who acts directly upon the Western cultural fabric, immersing himself in every realm of the real and the imagined, constantly poised between an overt declaration of the media power of his time and a more subtle yet engaged attitude toward the unveiling and revealing of a constellation of social realities—fascinating and controversial in equal measure. Choosing Andy Warhol at this moment, and displaying his relationship with visual culture in its broadest sense, from music to fashion to cinema, filtered through the dense weave of aesthetic reproduction, allows not only for a long journey through collective memory and our shared imaginary, but also sharpens the essential features of twentieth-century art history, nearly thirty years after the artist’s death.