Andy Warhol is arguably one of the most famous and widely discussed artists of the 20th century. While his depictions of consumer goods and celebrities gained widespread recognition, there is a common thread that runs through his career – starting as early as the late 1940s until his untimely death in the 1980s. He consistently sought an ideal of beauty – male beauty, and a form. He wanted to create lasting images of what he desired. Therefore, he visualized and immortalized this ongoing quest for ideal beauty.

From his early line drawings to the Screen Tests and experiments with moving images and films in the 1960s, the Torso paintings in the 1970s, and his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, there is a continuous search for the expression of this ideal. During his lifetime, these works were often considered inappropriate, immoral, perverse, or even pornographic and illegal. As a result, many of them never received the public attention and recognition they deserved.

“The Velvet Rage,” the book published in 2005 which gives the exhibition its name, describes what it feels like to grow up and live as a gay man in a predominantly heterosexual world. Warhol died in 1987 at the age of only fifty-eight. He left behind an incredibly complex and influential body of work but never experienced the open acceptance during his lifetime that we have today to dedicate ourselves to this specific body of work. While this openness and queerness seems threatened again today by changes in numerous societies, the Berlin exhibition in 2024 takes the opportunity to bring these works together for the first time.

The exhibition is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and Lisa Botti, Co-Curator.

• - https://www.berlin.de/tickets/ausstellungen/andy-warhol-velvet-rage-and-beauty-d807f5ad-937a-4412-bec7-6578cb6e4282/
• - https://www.museumsportal-berlin.de/de/veranstaltungen/ausstellungseroeffnung-andy-warhol-velvet-rage-and-beauty/