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closed Andy Warhol.

The show

Curated by Fabio Belloni

No artist sums up the idea of pop art as much as Andy Warhol. The interest in the imaginary of consumption, the mimesis of advertising language, the adoption of a cold, serial and apparently anonymous style: these are the points on which his research, matured in the early 1960s and developed up to the middle of the Eighties. However, it would be simplistic to identify him only with the pop phenomenon: Warhol represented much more, so much so that he became a key figure of the entire twentieth century. And so much, above all, to embody the new iconography of the contemporary artist: no longer a misfit genius but a successful man, skilled manager of himself and his Factory, even capable of dictating fashions in costume as in music. If this happened it was also because he almost immediately received a worldwide fame: no less than that of the Hollywood stars whose faces obsessively invade his paintings.

A complex, at times impenetrable character, Warhol has placed great care in the construction of his public image. We know his eccentric look like the works: thin, with a camera always with him and hair with an unlikely color, result of dyes or, more often, silver wigs. The laconic but fulminated declarations made throughout his career did the rest: disarming sentences for the naïveté mixed with ironic detachment, which leave the listener to guess where the provocation borders on cynicism.

The Andy Warhol exhibition. Two masterpieces from the collection of Francesco Federico Cerruti presents for the first time at the Castello di Rivoli the works of the artist so far kept in Villa Cerruti di Rivoli, a residence built by the Turin entrepreneur to house his formidable collection. In this case, these are high school graduation jobs. Hélène Rochas is one of the four paintings that the artist dedicated in 1975 to the former French model and former director of the perfumery company of the same name, known for both resourcefulness and sophisticated elegance. Like all those of the period, the work was born after a portrait session with the Polaroid. Having chosen the shot, Warhol commissioned his assistants to screen-print it on a canvas already painted with large brushstrokes of acrylic color, in this case with a green cast. Madame Rochas stands out for the charm of the pose: she becomes an ageless figure. The passage from the photo to the screen printing has canceled any chiaroscuro value, while the figure-ground relationship gives its definition to play with the ambiguous interpenetration between planes. The work belongs to the so-called Celebrity Portraits , commissioned paintings begun in 1972 when the artist returned to painting after years of filmic experimentation. Of those portraits that summarize the figures of the international star system, Warhol executed several versions: the first, more expensive, for the client, the others for the benefit of the market.

Made in 1982, The Poet and His Muse instead belongs to the cycle dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico and multiplies a work of his from 1959 with old-fashioned mannequins four times on the same canvas. Warhol had always admired the master of metaphysics: he had also met him on several occasions during his stays in Italy, in Rome and Venice. Yet it was only in that year - after visiting the great retrospective ordered by William Rubin at MoMA - that he decided to pay homage to him. It was not just the umpteenth citation in a period marked by continuous tributes to the classics, especially Italians (Botticelli, Leonardo, Raffaello). In fact, Warhol recognized him as a true precursor: “De Chirico repeated the same images throughout his life. I think he did it not only because collectors and art dealers asked him to do it, but because he felt like doing it and he considered repetition a means of expressing himself. This is probably what we have in common ... The difference? What he repeated regularly year after year, I repeat on the same day in the same painting ”.

Timetable and tickets

Address

Piazzale Mafalda di Savoia, 2
10098 Rivoli

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