An exhibition of Andy Warhol’s photographs of the male nude from the years 1982 to 1987. In addition, Warhol’s 1964 film Blow Job will be shown in the gallery’s side exhibition space. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, with an essay by Simon Goldhill.

Andy Warhol, well known for his silkscreen paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, was the most famous American figurehead of “Pop Art.” Warhol made bold commentary on commercialism and post-war capitalism through the manipulated representation and recurrent repetition of his subject. By exploiting the plethora of images and advertisements associated with consumer society and the media, Warhol exposed the triviality of images or events through their repetition and circulation.

Rarely shown in the United States, the black and white photographs exhibited here are directly linked to Warhol’s aesthetic and conceptual concerns. The imagery reflects an obsession with historical ideals of representation and demonstrates Warhol’s use of repetition. Posed, starkly lit and sexualized, Warhol’s nudes play with art historical precedents while mixing them with deliberate pornographic associations, forcing the viewer to question prevailing cultural representations constructed from the classical canon.

Blow Job is rarely screened in New York. The black and white film, an unedited 41 minutes long, focuses only on the face of Warhol’s handsome subject. Unlike the photographs, which embrace the male nude, the film conceals the body; the implied pornography is unseen. The subject matter, illegal at the time it was filmed (and further charged by its homosexual implications), is revealed only by the transformations of the subject’s face. The film constructs the image, or action, with the least amount of viewable information, and thus relies on the viewer’s response: the viewer’s own idealization of the activity ultimately creates the film’s content.