Andy Warhol: By Hand

Honor Fraser Gallery is pleased to present, Andy Warhol: By Hand, an intimate look at the renowned iconography of one of the most widely celebrated artists of the 20th century. 

"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."- Andy Warhol 

From death and disaster, to consumer culture, and the cult of celebrity, Andy Warhol presented the world with an objectified essence of daily life in post-war America. Renowned for pioneering a multilayered photographic silk-screen process, Warhol confronted his audiences with serialized reproductions of imagery from advertising, newspapers, comic books, cinema, and other forms of mass media. The exhibition of Andy Warhol: By Hand spans the last decade of his life, revisiting a wide spectrum of icons from the artist's oeuvre. When viewed in conversation with one another, the small-scale drawings serve as puzzle pieces, presenting us with an intimate time capsule of the curiosities and infatuations of Warhol's final years.

While a large majority of his career was spent sourcing images and objects from 20th century popular culture, Warhol also created works which spoke to his personal relationships and aesthetic interests, even dedicating time to documenting his own private collections. Initially rendered to accompany separate series over the course of his career, the works within Andy Warhol: By Hand explore the artist's fascination with camouflage, dollar signs, and children's toys in juxtaposition with depictions of Mt. Vesuvius, a hammer and sickle, and the German artist Joseph Beuys. In stark contrast to their highly saturated, screen-printed counterparts, Warhol's subjects are stripped bare of symbolic seriality and mechanization. Free from the aesthetic implications of technique and process, the selection of drawings invites the viewer to distinguish the artist's delicate hand from the bustle of the world he so avidly sought to capture.

Since the start of his career as a fine artist, Andy Warhol'swork attracted hordes of people hoping to glimpse the spectacle of imagery that seemed to confront everything the fine art world stood for. Despite the fact that many viewed his work as subversive, Warhol's primary motivation was not merely to shock or to elevate the image of tin robots, dollar bills, and camouflage. On the contrary, he sought to present his audience with a frank, albeit deadpan, reflection of the mass mediated production of American identity. Andy Warhol was both a by-product and a producer of this culture, generating a web of complexities his audience may never fully decipher.

Raw and exposed, Andy Warhol: By Hand challenges us to peel back the layers of controversy built into the artist's enigmatic legacy, offering a rare glimpse into the mind behind the persona. The show will be on view in Aspen CO, a town which Warhol fell in love with during his frequent trips in the 1970s and '80s. In the years leading up to his death, Aspen's pastoral beauty and glamorous residents inspired the artist to purchase a significant plot of land just outside of town. Lured from the glitz and grit of Manhattan, Warhol's ventures provided his audience with a new lens through which to view his work, his aspirations, and his reverence for all aspects of American culture.