Recapping Warhol Revisited: LA

“We created an exhibition that is intended to give visitors an experience that bridges the gap between Warhol’s more identifiable works and his more esoteric works,” states Revolver Gallery’s owner Ron Rivlin.

Revolver Gallery’s international touring exhibition examines Warhol's legacy through a series of rare prints and original paintings created in Warhol's iconic, graphic and revolutionary style. The brilliantly selected 200-plus pieces comprising Andy Warhol: Revisited trace and depict Warhol's rise to prominence as his art and public persona shook the 1960's artistic and social conventions of the sixties.

The exhibition is as unique as the artist himself as it features thematically curated rooms holding some of Warhol’s major subjects, such as the celebrity and the commodity. Over 50,000 visitors from February to August 2017 viewed the Los Angeles show, after its tremendously successful international runs in Vancouver and Toronto.

Another prominent theme of the show within the artist’s oeuvre – one that he established early on – is that of immortality. After his own brush with death when Valerie Solanis shot him at his studio, The Factory, in June of 1968, Warhol’s preoccupation with the notion of immortality and lead him to produce numerous series tackling the omnipresent and universal theme of death.

In Andy Warhol: Revisited, images of John F. Kennedy, Mao Zedong, Marilyn Monroe, Warhol’s Skull works and of course, the Gun, based on the gun used by Solanis, confront the viewer with questions of violence, death and immortality – while also pointing to the artist’s obsession with the consumerism in American culture.

Executed in a graphic style, like that of his pop masterworks, these images of handguns, skulls, political leaders and dead-celebrities become enticing, polychromatic and sellable icons. Warhol artistically forces the viewer to see or re-see the objects in our lives and cultural that have become as invisible as they are ubiquitous. Specifically, the Triple Dollar Sign, is significant in its portrayal of a mere concept that nevertheless dominates our world. The exhibition, Andy Warhol: Revisited, reveals how Warhol’s art re-imagines our world, then and now.