My camera and I, together we have the power to confer or to take away.
—Richard Avedon
They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
—Andy Warhol
Gagosian London is pleased to present the first major exhibition to pair works by Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol. Both artists rose to prominence in postwar America with parallel artistic output that occasionally overlapped. Their most memorable images, produced in response to changing cultural mores, are icons of the twentieth century.
Portraiture was a shared focus of both artists, and they made use of repetition and serialization: Avedon through the reproducible medium of photography, and in his group photographs, for which he meticulously positioned, collaged, and reordered images; Warhol in his method of stacked screenprinting, which enabled the consistent reproduction of an image. Avedon’s distinctive gelatin-silver prints and Warhol’s boldly colored silkscreens variously depict many of the same recognizable faces, including Marella Agnelli, Bianca Jagger, Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Rudolf Nureyev.
Both Avedon and Warhol came from modest beginnings and had tremendous commercial success working for major magazines in New York beginning in the 1940s. The 1960s marked artistic turning points for both artists as they increasingly moved away from strictly commercial work toward their mature independent styles. The works in the exhibition, which date from the 1950s through the 1990s, emphasize such common themes as social and political power, the evolving acceptance of cultural differences, the inevitability of mortality, and the glamour and despair of celebrity.
