CURRENT EXHIBITION

The Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is proud to present Andy Warhol - Serial Portraits, featuring a selection of celebrated and lesser-known works by the iconic American artist. As part of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Hors-les-Murs programme, this new exhibition fulfills the Fondation’s mission of reaching an international audience through the presentation of previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka.

Andy Warhol was a multifaceted figure, one of Pop Art’s great masters and an extremely prolific artist who worked in New York from 1949, when he started out as advertising illustrator, until his death in 1987. Though perhaps best-known for his colourful, mass-produced silkscreen prints, he was also a film director, music producer, show designer, television host and celebrity magazine editor. As he pursued a variety of career paths, he enjoyed manipulating his own image to create numerous avatars — as evidenced by the silkscreened self-portraits and abundant staged photographs he made throughout his career.

Portraiture had always been central to Warhol’s work, from his studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) until his death in New York in 1987. He compulsively sketched, photographed, filmed and silkscreened the people in his entourage, notably movie stars and figures of the high society and art scene. As the decades passed, the images he captured of these innumerable individuals came to form a collective portrait of that day and age.

When he was young, Warhol began collecting newspaper clippings of celebrities and quickly learned the importance of properly “staging” oneself to achieve the greatest media impact. Donning a wig and dark glasses, he created an enigmatic persona that he sought to publicise as much as possible to ensure successful sales of his artwork. He was a master of disguise and masquerade, embodying a wide range of characters in his posed photographs and self-portraits. His “in drag” Polaroids, for which he changed his looks to resemble a woman, as well as the numerous Self-Portraits he created over his career, demonstrate his ability to camouflage his appearance, raising questions about identity and image manipulation.

From his photo booth Self-Portrait of 1963-64 to 1981’s enigmatic The Shadow, the works assembled here illustrate both the evolution of the artist’s media image and the technical and stylistic development of his artistic practice. His rarely shown drawings of young men, sketched in ballpoint pen in the 1950s, open the exhibition and offer an uncommon glimpse of the expressive, highly personal style that was characteristic of his early advertising illustrations. Though this brilliant mastery of drawing would occasionally resurface as he pursued his art, it would become more discreet in the screenprints to come. This exhibition establishes a common thread connecting the intimate Unidentified Male sketches to the photo booth shots in a dishevelled “fright wig” taken the year before the artist’s death to his 1980s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, the fruit of a ceaseless exploration of mechanised artistic techniques. From behind his dark glasses, through his silkscreening and use of diverse camera forms, Andy Warhol once again demonstrates his unparalleled capacity for adaptation and innovation.

About the Fondation Louis Vuitton

The Fondation Louis Vuitton serves the public interest and is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art and artists, as well as 20^th-century works to which their inspirations can be traced. The Collection and the exhibitions it organizes seek to engage a broad public. The magnificent building created by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and already recognized as an emblematic example of the 21^st-century architecture, constitutes the Fondation's seminal artistic statement. Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has welcomed more than eleven million visitors from France and around the world.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton commits to engage in international initiatives, both at the Fondation and in partnership with public and private institutions, including other foundations and museums such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (Icons of Modern Art. The Shchukin Collection in 2016 and The Morozov Collection in 2021), the MoMA in New York (Being Modern: MoMA in Paris), and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism) among others. The artistic direction also developed a specific "Hors-les-murs" programme taking place within the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, which are exclusively devoted to exhibitions of works from the Collection. These exhibitions are open to the public free of charge and promoted through specific cultural communication.