(Telestock) – Intesa San Paolo opens to the public at Gallerie d’Italia – Naplesfrom 25 September 2024 to 16 February 2025, the exhibition “Andy Warhol. Triple Elvis” curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. The exhibition features a significant focus of works by Andy Warhol, including three fundamental graphic cycles brought together for the first time and coming from the Luigi and Peppino Agrati Collection, an important collection of contemporary art formed between the 1960s and 1980s and incorporated, thanks to the legacy of Cavalier Luigi Agrati, into the historical-artistic heritage protected and promoted by Intesa Sanpaolo.
The exhibition, which is presented as a dossier exhibition, – explains Intesa San Paolo in a note – intends to tell the story of Warhol’s original and extraordinary artistic research starting from the work Triple Elvis of 1963, the year in which the artist worked for the first time on the repetition of the image on the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to the “Elvis Paintings” at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. It was precisely in those years that the artist began to include in his works characters that he himself, ahead of his time, defined as “famous”. At the same time, it will be possible to see the evolution of the American artist in the Sixties and in the very early Seventies through three important graphic cycles exhibited together here for the first time: Marilyn, Mao Tse-Tung and Electric Chairs.
“The wealth of masterpieces present in the Bank’s art collections, starting from the exceptional core of the Agrati collection, – said Michele Coppola, Executive Director Art, Culture and Historical Heritage Intesa Sanpaolo – strengthens the desire to increasingly share its variety, beauty and value in our Gallerie d’Italia. This is where the new in-depth study that the museum in via Toledo is dedicating to “Triple Elvis”, Warhol’s iconic work, comes from. The initiative confirms the vocation of a living, open and dynamic space, capable of generating original proposals that speak to all of Naples and to the thousands of tourists who choose this magnificent city”.
The exhibition opens with two cycles of graphic works, the series of 10 Electric Chairs silkscreens where the image of an electric chair becomes a political icon but also a meditation on humanity and death, and the 10 silkscreens in which the artist, through the decisive use of color, shows the portrait of Mao, made in 1972, the year of Nixon’s famous trip to China. In the same room, dedicated to the great masterpiece Triple Elvis, there is also another universally celebrated series, that of the Marylins, from 1967, which consecrates the great firmament of Hollywood myths, which have today become the emblem of the American artist.
Also on display is a portrait of Warhol: a small and delicate photographic work by Duane Michals, an American photographer, in which the artist appears and disappears. The two Vesuvius from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection conclude this refined exhibition, testifying to the important bond that the artist had not only with Italy, but above all with the city of Naples, thanks also to prominent figures such as Lucio Amelio who involved him in a series of exhibitions that were fundamental to the history of the city.
The exhibition is part of the Vitality of Time project, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, to delve into previously unseen aspects of the Bank’s collections. Part of the same cycle are the six rooms set up, again on the second floor of the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples, where it is possible to admire works by important artists from the late 1940s to the 1990s, including Fontana, Kounellis, Boetti and Sol Lewitt.
The Naples museum, together with those in Milan, Turin and Vicenza, is part of the Intesa Sanpaolo Gallerie d’Italia museum project, led by Michele Coppola, Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historic Heritage of the Bank.