Black on White

ANDY WARHOLBLACK ON WHITEMARCH 15 - APRIL 21, 2012During the Sixties, Andy Warhol made a rare documentation of subjects in time with his photobooth portraits ; These photobooth strips, no matter how much they are readymades, mark the first instance of Warhol making multiples using a strictly photographic medium, that is, the gelatin silver print.From 1982 to 1987, Andy Warhol made 503 works composed of black-and-white photographic prints stitched together with thread. These works are indebted to his earlier repetitive silkscreen paintings and are also the result of lifelong photographic exploration and a prolific decade.Decades before widespread reliance on portable media devices, he documented his daily activities and interactions on his beloved Minox 35EL camera. Warhol captured life’s every minute detail in all its messy, ordinary glamour and demonstrate the range of Warhol’s aesthetic interests and the reach of his curious and far-roaming eye.The gelatin silver photographs presented here reveal his extraordinary compositional skill, his eye for detail and his compulsive desire to document the time in which he lived.Andy Warhol manipulated the tenets of modern art photography and subverted the objectivity of photography by making viewers aware of photographic mediation through multiples of images, Andy Warhol paradoxically made unique objects in their many photographic series.Born 1928, died 1987More than twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture.His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.