If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
—Andy Warhol
Gagosian is pleased to announce the exhibition Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Work of Andy Warhol. The extensive exhibition, which occupies all galleries at 555 West 24th Street, New York, as well as a new gallery at 522 West 21st Street, draws together many of Warhol’s most iconic paintings from the following series executed during the 1970s and ’80s: Mao, Ladies & Gentlemen, Hammer & Sickle, Skulls, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Reversals, Retrospectives, Shadows, Rorschach, Camouflage, Oxidation, The Last Supper, Self Portraits and more. Comprised of works from the last eighteen years of Warhol’s life, Cast a Cold Eye includes masterpieces that have been rarely or never before seen in New York, as well as important loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Andy Warhol Museum; and private collections.
In his later career, Warhol was often vilified by art critics for being little more than a society portraitist and social impresario. But, at the same time as a constant stream of commissioned portraits of the rich and famous emanated from his studio, Warhol steadily produced paintings of profound content and uncannily prophetic significance. This was Warhol the history painter, treating the bigger picture of contemporary life and its matrix of power, belief, money and mortality in his characteristically deadpan way. Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Works of Andy Warhol begins to map the conceptual breadth and gravitas of Warhol’s late, great work.