
BERLIN — The premise of Velvet Rage and Magnificence on the Neue Nationalgalerie is that Warhol’s persistent dedication to representing the male physique, lengthy sidelined in understandings of his oeuvre, affirms that queerness was foundational to his apply. This argument informs a large exhibition of greater than 300 works that primarily examine the conventionally enticing, typically nude, male kind throughout a spread of media and scales.
As prolific as Warhol was, the sheer quantity of labor that matches into the present’s parameters is beautiful. That many of those objects have both by no means been exhibited or haven’t appeared in vital surveys displays a historic tendency to exhibit Warhol’s extra express items not within the blue-chip galleries that offered his most well-known work, however moderately in much less prestigious, typically queer areas. But, whilst different topics and media skyrocketed him to fame, easy drawings and images of the male physique, clothed or nude, in full or intimately on a face or phallus, could comprise probably the most fixed through-line in his apply.
The present’s argument — that queer need undergirds all of Warhol’s work — is hardly implicit. A timeline close to the doorway maps his life in opposition to the elaboration of LGBTQ+ rights in Germany and the US, staging the recurrence of this material in his apply as a political act forward of its time. In doing so, the present appears to place itself as half of a bigger venture of inflecting our understanding of Warhol along with his personal sexuality, and understanding his artwork as a part of a family tree of the way of creating artwork that mirror methods of being queer.

The exhibition falls in need of realizing the promise of this path as a result of it largely avoids putting its objects, or bigger argument, in dialog with each the Warhol canon as now we have lengthy identified it and with new archival revelations concerning the artist — reminiscent of Jennifer Sichel’s 2018 discovery that an interview with the famously evasive artist had been edited earlier than publication to take away myriad allusions to queerness. As an alternative, this present primarily cleaves the 2 tasks, perpetuating these divides moderately than facilitating their productive restore. It additionally presents a Platonic best the of male embodiment; by foregrounding one particular sort of physique — younger, male, conventionally enticing and proportioned, and exactly the sort of physique Warhol pursued — the present nearly loses the thread of fungibility, dissimulation, irony, and play for which Warhol is widely known, and which offer the germinal node of queerness in his work. In bringing all method of postmodern representational methods to bear on a kind that’s, in the long run, a single sort of physique, it suggests a facet of Warhol that’s homosexual in its dedicated concentrate on different males, however missing the slippage and multiplicity that characterizes the queer.
The exception to the present’s (and Warhol’s) nearly singular concentrate on an idealized male physique is a two-part sequence of portraits of trans ladies of colour composed of pictures and the identical photographs enlarged, display printed, and overpainted. In a departure from the artist’s extra acquainted screen-printed photographs, by which his utility and selection of colours typically ironized or dislocated his topics, these are strikingly flattering, their palettes refusing the comedian, grotesque, typically dissonant juxtapositions discovered elsewhere. Warhol approaches the faces of those ladies — exceptions to this present on each raced and gendered phrases — with care, moderately than the will that suffuses the exhibition’s different works. It’s maybe in giving us each the images and display prints of those and some different items that Velvet Rage and Magnificence actually hits the mark: It gives a glimpse into the potential of Warhol’s queer politics, whereas making clear that maybe probably the most queer points of his oeuvre are people who evaded his personal consciousness.


Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Magnificence continues on the Neue Nationalgalerie (Potsdamer Strasse 50, Berlin, Germany) by means of October 6. The exhibition was curated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, with Lisa Botti as co-curator and curatorial help and venture administration by Nikola Richolt.