Andy Warhol’s Long Shadow

The new styles of representation that Warhol developed and his challenging of gender norms both resonate with the thematic centrality of identity, glamour, and performance to photographs by Nan Goldin, which here include Ivy in opera gloves, Boston (1972). Jean-Michel Basquiat’s double portrait of himself with Warhol, Dos Cabezas (1982), was made shortly after Basquiat first met his idol, while Sweet Pungent (1984–85) is one of more than 160 paintings on which the pair collaborated—it also saw Warhol return to painting by hand.

As often as Warhol experimented with new art-making strategies, he also reimagined his public persona through techniques of doubling, masking, and recording. In his Polaroid Self-Portrait in Fright Wig (1986), he alters his appearance by donning silver wig and sunglasses, also obscuring his features in shadow. Foregrounding an uneasy affinity with this approach, Douglas Gordon’s Self-Portrait of You +Me (2 piece) Andy (2008) comprises a commercial reproduction of a self-portrait of a bewigged Warhol that is partially burned, split, and mounted to a mirrored background. Dew (2023) by Urs Fischer employs post-Warholian strategies of appropriation and transformation of commercial imagery, while in The Athlete (2024), Nathaniel Mary Quinn interprets Polaroids and paintings of Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Warhol’s Athletes series, along with a Campbell’s soup can.

Zeng Fanzhi’s double portrait of himself and Warhol in Fly (2000) imagines the two artists—their features hidden behind identical masks—standing in a field of flowers, as two jets fly overhead. A new painting by Takashi Murakami echoes Warhol’s Flowers by abstracting from nature to create an instantly recognizable form, while Sky (2012) by Alex Israel recalls the Pop artist’s embrace of artificiality. Cool Down Bench (RWB) (2023) by Derrick Adams embraces popular culture, Untitled (2010) by Richard Prince employs a humor conversant with Warhol’s, and Sterling Ruby’s BC (4833) (2014) is inspired in part by Warhol’s Rorschach paintings. Through these works, Andy Warhol’s Long Shadow brings to light unexpected juxtapositions with artists whose work “thinks” through, with, and beyond Warhol’s oeuvre, demonstrating its enduring relevance.