In the last room of the exhibition at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid they have placed a bench. It is not usual to find furniture in temporary ones. But Estrella de Diego, curator of an exhibition that has been on her mind for more than 20 years, wanted the viewer to sit for a moment in front of three monumental paintings by Warhol and Mark Rothko, no matter how brief the visit was. “Contemplation is, par excellence, a political and radical act,” explains the professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid. And he asks: “What happens if we look again? Maybe we can stop seeing those other things that bombard us. Escape from that excess of images.”
The room is called Space as metaphysicsand the two works shown by Warhol represent a series of shadows created in the late 1970s made from mysterious brush strokes that make it impossible to distinguish figures. The light is dim. The entire assembly is designed to stop, observe and ask yourself: is this really the same guy who elevated a can of soup to the category of art?
De Diego is aware that whoever comes to the museum may come to spend time with the person who was reproduced endlessly in the media. But that’s probably not what’s going to happen to him. This may be a blockbuster exhibition —blockbusterin art jargon—but not for the reasons you might initially imagine.
There are photos of Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie O and Elvis, but above all there is a clear intention to dismantle the convictions fixed in the collective imagination around Warhol. “She was a victim of the image of a dumb blonde that, it is true, she liked and also cultivated as a mask,” says Guillermo Solana, director of Thyssen. “But he was a guy with many layers and strata of meaning.” The curator adds: “Something similar happened to Pollock, he was also forced to play the role that had been assigned to him. Each one lived the dramatic story that was imposed on him.”
To dismantle these preconceived ideas, De Diego has put together pieces by Warhol, Pollock and other artists such as Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Marisol Escobar, Sol LeWitt and Cy Twombly, brought from thirty institutions in North America and Europe. From this impressive number of borrowed works – they have caused the budget to skyrocket just due to the complexity of transferring such large pieces – he has established a series of dialogues to discover an abstract Warhol and a Pollock that approaches figuration.
There are obvious relationships in the exhibition: the silver Elvis image and the piece Phosphorescence made from aluminum paint. There are other dialogues that force, once again, to stop for a moment and discover that in Warhol’s thread paintings there is a deep reflection on Pollock’s work in the 1940s and 1950s because everything that dripped from one was used by the other in a very thoughtful way. De Diego uses the term “chorrear” to fix in the archive of memories those curved lines of enamel that are not refined. “A priori they embodied two opposite aspects: painting without image and image without painting. To finish with this idea we must look at the underground strata of their works,” Solana explains about the stripping task in which Diego has been immersed. “The work of my life,” said the expert.
Furthermore, the exhibition, which can be seen until January 25, aims to put an end to the canon, those very clear definitions that history uses in its different stories to be able to tell itself. “We cut history into pieces because it is easier to understand,” explains the curator, “but this is not the case, which is why with this exhibition we question the idea of space and how it is conceived in the West in a binary way.” For the expert, that place about which Warhol and Pollock create is queeris a middle ground, halfway between the abstract and the figurative.
An example is worth it. As soon as you enter there are two paintings of Coca-Cola. For a second, identification with Warhol’s work is immediate. When you look at pieces by Pollock and Krasner, those brush strokes on the side of the bottle no longer seem so iconic. They are abstract lines, an impressionistic imitation. By returning to Warhol, the reading of his work has already changed. In the room dedicated to photographs of repetitions that are so linked to the work of the artist of the pop art, The sensation is of such saturation that the mosaics become unstructured and begin to resemble the works of their expressionist and abstract contemporaries.
“He is more intellectual and avant-garde than the public imagines, here is a Warhol that we are not used to,” Solana reiterates, emphasizing “the ironic and perverse look” of the creator. “Many of these works have not been exhibited in Spain and it is the first time that so many of Pollock’s works have been brought together. You are going to find surprises, which is not bad for an exhibition. Tell your friends and enemies to come,” summarizes De Diego.
