Both capture the transience of glamour, the rapid rise and fall of celebrity, the age of consumerism. Warhol layers paint, erasing subtle detail yet somehow saying a great deal more. Neither creates ‘perfect’ images Avedon’s photograph of Louis Armstrong is heavily blurred, capturing the musician in movement, mid-performance. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.Īvedon often uses doubled images Warhol responds with works that seem intentionally to play off the effects of photographic techniques (the silkscreen of ‘Keith Haring’ has the appearance of an enlarged negative image, exposed three times over). Copyright: 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Centre for the Arts. Copyright: The Richard Avedon Foundation.Īvedon expands the concept of portrait photography using scale – ‘The Family’ (1976) is a line-up of the movers and shakers of American culture and politics covering an entire wall, while ‘Andy Warhol and members of the Factory…’ (1969) is a life-size group portrait in three frames – and framing devices: a portrait of Francis Bacon (1979) depicts the artist twice, arbitrarily cropped.

Cropping, doubling, colour are used to challenge conventional presentation and notions of gender and morality – as in ‘Walking Torso’ (1977) – devices that Avedon also employs in photographs of counterculture, celebrity or notorious figures. He continually experiments with combinations of silkscreen printing and paint – and other media (a portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat is created from ‘acrylic, silkscreen ink and urine on canvas’). One is immediately reminded of just how innovative Warhol was. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The austere spaces within Gagosian’s Britannia Street gallery are divided roughly into a number of themes, from ‘social and political power’ and ‘celebrity’ through to ‘mortality’.

Copyright: The Richard Avedon Foundation.īoth artists were fundamentally concerned with portraiture, and worked to reinvent that genre in the newly liberated society of 1960s America.

The idea of an exhibition pairing two artists is far from new but the Gagosian’s inspired juxtaposition of Richard Avedon’s photography with Andy Warhol’s screenprints creates a dynamic game of compare and contrast between two of the 20th century’s artistic pioneers.

Richard avedon andy warhol portrait