Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media
⬤ Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) 3 Mar - 20 May 2023
It’s hard to get excited by another Andy Warhol retrospective. Since the artist’s death in 1987, there have been seemingly endless attempts to frame his place in twentieth-century art and aesthetics, mostly taking place in the US, and culminating in the Whitney Museum’s 2018 to 2019 retrospective. What could an antipodean showing possibly add?
Warhol and Photography: A Social Media, currently on view at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), shows there is still more to be said. It does so despite—and, I believe, precisely because—it draws mostly on Australian collections. Centring on forty-five Warhol photographs recently acquired by the AGSA, it features loans from the NGV, the Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia. This survey of works, cannily selected by curator Julie Robinson, manages to provide a representative sample of Warhol’s oeuvre. Its particular photographic focus, however, also opens up a set of less familiar questions about the status of the artist’s work in today’s artistic and technological economies.
Caitlyn Lesiuk is the Convenor of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and a PhD candidate at Deakin University, where she teaches philosophy.
