Warhol’s Social Media

“I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty.”
- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), 1975.

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present Warhol’s Social Media, its first exhibition of unique photographs by Andy Warhol (1928-1987). The exhibition will be on view from November 3-24 at the High Line Nine at 507 West 27th Street.

Best known as the defining Pop artist of his generation, Warhol’s portraits of celebrities, socialites, and other notables are held in virtually every prominent modern art collection in the world. These iconic paintings of larger-than-life figures began through the intimate, immediate medium of photography, specifically his Polaroid Big Shot camera. He was so enamored of the process that, once given a camera in the late 1960s he was never without one again, famously calling it his “date.”

The selection of works presented in Warhol’s Social Media reflect the fluidity with which Warhol worked in photography. Dolly Parton, a 1985 Polaroid, was part of a formal sitting for the final silkscreen and polymer portraits of the same year. Henry Geldzahler and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a 1984 gelatin silver print, is an intimate, impromptu image capturing close friends at ease at a party. Tina Turner, a 1981 gelatin silver print, is caught mid-gesture as she beams at the camera before heading onstage to open for The Rolling Stones.

The works in the exhibition display Warhol’s fervent commitment to documentation and artistic experimentation in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt in 1968 that nearly took his life. He plays with distortion and perspective, intimacy and distance, and the inversion of anonymity and celebrity. The result is a body of original photographs stunning in its breadth and singular in its nature, capturing glimpses of objects, moments and people that breathe new life into the study of Andy Warhol himself.

For more information about Warhol’s Social Media: Unique Gelatin Silver Prints and Polaroids from an Important Collection, please contact us at nine@hollistaggart.com or 212.628.4000. For press inquiries, please contact Alina Sumajin or Sascha Freudenheim, PAVE Communications & Consulting at alina@paveconsult.com, 646.369.2050 or sascha@paveconsult.com, 917.544.6057.