Andy Warhol Hearts

The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to be showing from 20^th April until 25^th May an exhibition of works by Andy Warhol entitled Hearts. The show will consist of 73 paintings and drawings, which were all executed between 1979 and 1986 and do all, as the title suggests, have in one form or another “hearts” as their subject matter, either in the form of a human heart, a heart in form of a candy box, diamond dust hearts, physiological diagrams, instructions of what to do in case of a heart attack as well as pages of phone books listing all the people whose surname is Heart.

Andy Warhol was a bastion of improbability, an actor with the world as his stage, an artist who implemented the common into the guise of the extraordinary. The images that the world associates with Warhol include soup cans, brillo boxes, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Mao Tse-tung, but nevertheless do the works exhibited here at the gallery are an example of the variety of genres which Warhol used for his œuvres.

Consider the artistic context. It is eloquent: 1977 witnesses the Shadows, 1979 the Skulls and Inversions. The hearts should be seen in this perspective; possible in opposition, but perhaps too in harmony with the morbid darkness haunting a body of work the bulk of which (the Electric Chairs, the Marilyns, the Disasters) Leo Castelli refused to describe as Pop. Apart from the Campell`s soup cans and the Brillo boxes he found it too tragic. Pop, for Castelli, was optimistic and naive.

The hearts shown here are somewhere on the border. They are like the Flowers of 1964 with their outspread – almost caricature, child-like clichés of flowers. They are also brutally organic like the Skulls.

In all the paintings the heart is hardly a theme, or, if we absolutely insist that it be one, it is a theme so overworked that it disappears under the overload, which is exactly what Warhol wanted.

An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Michel Nuridsany will be published on this occasion.