Andy Warhol and his Slovak Roots - Cork City (Ireland) Exhibition

Through an unusual collaboration between Cork Civic Trust; Cork Public Museum, the Embassy of the Slovak Republic and the Museum of Modern Art, Medzilaborce, the King of Pop Art, Andy Warhol visits Cork in the shape of a unique exhibition titled Andy Warhol – His Slovak Roots.

While the main focus of the exhibition centres on thirty one Warhol originals, it also includes original artifacts from Warhol’s childhood and life, and photographs by Billy Name, Warhol’s confidante.

Painter; avant-garde filmmaker; sculptor; photographer; writer; commercial illustrator; muse and patron; Celebrity with a capital C– all such descriptions merely skim beneath the surface of the artistic genius of Andy Warhol. Warhol’s own words make for what even now would be an unusually blunt mission statement.

I'll endorse with my name any of the following; clothing AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK N' ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, food, helium, whips, MONEY” Andy Warhol

Commercially astute, Warhol became an extremely successful commercial and graphic artist in his own right, earning over $100,000 a year, an enormous sum for the 1950s. Warhol was a phenomenon; - a whirlwind of ideas and a master of linking conceptual substance with popular consumerism. Art critics of the time reacted negatively to Warhol's embrace of market culture but Warhol was not only at the centre of an unstoppable revolution in art, he was the revolution. His paintings of everyday consumer items from Campbell Soup Cans to Coca Cola bottles, and of popular celebrities from Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to Mick Jagger very quickly caught the public imagination.

Warhol attracted a motley group of actors; writers; rock musicians; and underground artists, creating in the process ‘The Factory’; itself an intrinsic element of the Warhol revolution whereby Warhol strove not only to create art from items of mass consumerism but to mass produce art itself. Andy Warhol is the father of Pop Art. Dollar Bills; branded products; celebrities; images inspired by newspaper clippings – the subjects of his paintings were, and remain, instantly recognisable.

Sponsored by Ballymore Properties, Andy Warhol – His Slovak Roots will be launched in the Cork Public Museum on 3rd May 2007 by His Excellency Jan Gabor, Slovak Ambassador to Ireland.

Contact John X Miller +353 (0)21 4279925 or email: visioncentre@eircom.net

Tel: +353 (0)21 4270679 • E-mail: museum@corkcity.ie