Andy Warhol and Mario Schifano, timeless symbols of the international Pop Art season, are the protagonists of the opening exhibition of the Imago Museum, a museum center entirely dedicated to modern and contemporary art created in Pescara by the Pescarabruzzo Foundation.

“Warhol and Schifano between pop art and classicism” is an exceptional exhibition that captures, with originality, connections and differential differences between the two masters. Cleverly built around a corpus of works ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s, the exhibition proposes a path that winds around the concept of iconicity in its double ancient and modern meaning. Through a new look, Pop Art and Classism, opposite and apparently irreconcilable dimensions, different declinations of the same fascination for the image and for the myth appear.

If the late Warhol incorporates the masterpieces of art history within his repertoire of characters and celebrities, adapting them to a mechanical and serial treatment (as in the Paolo Uccello of the Details of Renaissance Paintings series), Schifano between the eighties and Novanta initiates an intense return to antiquity, focusing more and more on the material quality of the pictorial sign. The Matres Matuta cycle represents in this sense the culminating moment of the exhibition: through 15 canvases, 10 charcoals and 2 mixed media works, Schifano shifts his attention from the television screen (reproduced on canvas, or photographed and retouched) and looks back at complex Etruscan mythography to unfold the figurative matrices of an ancestral story, that of Mater Matuta, goddess of dawn and birth.

Thanks to an extraordinary loan, granted by the Provincial Campano Museum of Capua, the exhibition "Warhol and Schifano between pop art and classicism" is enriched with 6 statues from the archaeological area of Campania discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, in the place where an important temple dedicated to the cult of Mater Matuta. From those excavations emerged hundreds of statues depicting a woman sitting with one or more children in her arms, probably ex voto, referring to the ancient divinity from which Schifano took inspiration for his paintings.