Brooklyn Museum: Andy Warhol: The Last Decade

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade is the first U.S. museum survey to examine the late work of American artist Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Encompassing nearly fifty works, the exhibition reveals the artist’s vitality, energy, and renewed spirit of experimentation. During this time Warhol produced more works, in a considerable number of series and on a vastly larger scale, than at any other point in his forty-year career. It was a decade of great artistic development for him, during which a dramatic transformation of his style took place alongside the introduction of new techniques.

Warhol continued to expand upon his artistic and business ventures with commissioned portraits, print series, television productions, and fashion projects, but he also reengaged with painting. In the late 1970s, he developed a new interest in abstraction, first with his Oxidations and Shadows series and later with his Yarn, Rorschach, and Camouflage paintings. His return to the hand-painted image in the 1980s was inspired by collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. The exhibition concludes with Warhol’s variations on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, one of the largest series of his career. Together, these works provide an important framework for understanding Warhol’s late career by showing how he simultaneously incorporated the screened image and pursued a reinvention of painting.

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Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987). The Last Supper, 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 116 x 390 in. (294.6 x 990.6 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh