VIENNA, AUSTRIA.- The Albertina presents Andy Warhol: Popstars. Drawings and Collages, on view through February 18, 2007. Andy Warhol, child to Slovak immigrants, staged himself as a superstar, thus creating a link between the Warhol trademark and the American Dream of social ascent. The protagonist of Pop Art and maker of series-produced portraits of stars was both an observer and a representative of the age of mass culture. Starting on 24 November 2006, the ALBERTINA will be presenting over sixty drawings and collages dating from 1975 to 1986 in its extended and modernised Pfeilerhalle. More than half of the works have never been displayed publicly. They derive from the artist’s estate, which has been entrusted to the care of the »Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts« in New York. The graphic portraits of such famous personalities as Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson oscillate between splendour and melancholy, instant spontaneity and the serial repetition typical of pop culture, turning an ordinary person into an icon.

Warhol captured what seem to be intimate moments from his encounters with outstanding musicians of his time, committing them to Polaroid or paper. In the artist’s Private Viewing Room, one has a chance to meet Aretha Franklin, Liza Minnelli, Charles Aznavour, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. From 1963 onwards, Warhol entertained a particularly close relationship with the Stones. Mick Jagger, androgynous icon and paragon of the zeitgeist of those days, was committed to paper by Warhol’s reduced pencilling and different printing methods. In the mid-1970s, Warhol made the designs for the album cover of Love You Live, which appeared in 1977 at Virgin Records. The fourteen sheets of the Love You Live series and the portraits of Mick Jagger are certainly in the focus of this exhibition.

Warhol mostly used photographs as models for his portraits, transferring them to a sheet of paper mounted on the wall by means of overhead projection. Using a grey graphite pencil, he subsequently traced certain outlines in order to mark the features of his sitters. These graphite drawings may also be considered as studies for the coloured acrylic pictures and silk-screen prints. Beginning in the late 1940s, Warhol, who had started out as a commercial artist, developed a large range of artistic reproduction techniques. He used them to blur the boundaries between original and reproduction, thus undermining the traditional notion of art.

Apart from depicting celebrities, Warhol also staged his own personality in his art. In Celebrity Collage of 1978, he explicitly played with his own cult status: by incorporating his self-portrait in profile, he placed himself as a star amidst stars and simultaneously depicted himself as an oversized observer.

In his portraits, Warhol confined himself to the linear representation of a few prominent features. While the reduced pencil strokes interpret the attitude of stardom, they question it at the same time. Warhol deconstructed the identity of an icon by reducing it to shining reflections.

His saying »In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes« of 1968 was varied by the artist a few years later: »In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.« Thus, he formulated a dialectic whose negative aspect is characteristic of today’s media society. With this exhibition, Klaus Albrecht Schröder deepens the focus of the ALBERTINA’s traditional collection activity of American Pop Art of the 1960s and ‘70s: »It is the original drawings presented in the exhibition that represent a medium systematically losing significance in Pop Art. Original drawing, which is identified as the spontaneous reflection of an artist’s temperament, is interpreted and modified by Andy Warhol in an entirely unprecedented fashion. The motif is not the person, but a photographic reproduction, rendered by Warhol with all its haziness, reflections, and highlights. At the same time, this exhibition marks the opening of the extended Pfeilerhalle, the final addition to the ALBERTINA’s exhibition floors pace. By incorporating a projecting portico dating from 1865, the floors pace could be extended to 450 square metres altogether. In addition, the so-called Friedrichsküche, a room resembling a chapel, was adapted and can now be used for exhibition projects as well.«

The exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation, New York, and the lenders Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Udo Brandhorst, André Heller, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, as well as several private lenders.