The exhibition “Andy Warhol. The Advertising of the Form” opened last 22 October and can be visited until 26 March 2023 at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan. It boasts more than three hundred works divided into seven thematic areas and thirteen sections to retrace the career of the most famous star of Pop Art. Starting from the beginning of the 1950s, with iconic objects symbolising mass consumerism, the exhibition path leads to an exploration of the relationship with the sacred in the 1980s. “Andy Warhol. The Advertising of the Form” is promoted and produced by Comune di Milano-Cultura and Navigare, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva with Edoardo Falcioni for Art Motors, Partner BMW and Hublot. 

The works come from the Andy Warhol Estate, Keith Haring and prestigious private collections, and document a journey through multiple topics and mediums. On display are canvases, silkscreen prints on silk, cotton and paper, as well as drawings, photographs, original records, T-shirts, the Commodore Amiga 2000 computer with its digital illustrations – the first NFTs in history –, the BMW Art Car painted by Warhol along with the video in which he realised it, the faithful reconstruction of the first Factory and a multimedia section with film projections to be viewed with three-dimensional glasses.

“Warhol,” says Bonito Oliva, “is the Raffaello of American mass society who gives surface to every depth of the image, thus making it immediately usable, ready for consumption like every product that populates our daily lives. In this way he develops an unprecedented classicism in his aesthetic transformation. Thus the advertising of the form creates the epiphany, i.e. the appearance, of the image”.