From 18 April to 20 July 2014, the Palazzo delle Arti in Naples hosts the Andy Warhol exhibition. Showcases, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and organized by Spirale d'ideae in collaboration with the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Municipality of Naples. The title of the exhibition, Showcases, arises from the exhibition on the ground floor of Palazzo Roccella of a large group of works on paper taken from the Golden Shoes series, created by Warhol at the beginning of his career in the Big Apple when, in the mid-50s, he worked as an advertising graphic designer and window dresser for the shops on Madison Avenue. Similarly, the exhibition closes with the presentation of serigraphs of Campbell's soup and Camoufflage, "sculpture-boxes" and t-shirts created by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in harmony with the will of the artist, who had pursued his dream of popularity through the serial multiplication of his own works, in an unprecedented competition with industrial production techniques and the rules of large-scale distribution.
The exhibition brings together 180 works and pays particular attention to the relationship between them Andy Warhol in Naples, born in the mid-70s thanks to his friendship with the gallery owner Lucio Amelio.
In fact, the exhibition itinerary winds through the portraits of well-known characters of the city, whom the artist got to know during his visits to Italy, such as Graziella Lonardi Buontempo, Ernesto Esposito, Peppino di Bernardo and of course Joseph Beuys, in addition to the Neapolitan views of his Napoliroids. The birth of his most famous and monumental headline work, Fate Presto, is owed to his friendship with Lucio Amelio, based on the first page of the Mattino of November 23, 1980, whose scream transformed the dramatic event of the Irpinia earthquake into news. that for its destructive violence impressed the artist, so much to inspire him, a few years later, a new series of works, Vesuvius, in which the image of the volcano, one of the classic themes of local iconography, is obsessively reproduced in colors different. "For me the eruption - explained Andy Warhol - is a shocking image, an extraordinary event and also a great piece of sculpture ... Vesuvius for me is much greater than a myth: it is a terribly real thing". Overshadowing characteristic phenomena of Naples such as the "femminielli", the production of fakes or the singing tradition, the exhibition proposes the Ladies and Gentlemen series of 1975 (with relative acetates and polaroids) and the drawings made by the artist starting from the photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden (1978) purchased by Lucio Amelio; the historic Marilyn series from 1967 and the one signed in 1985 by Warhol with the inscription «this is not mine» (Marilyn this is not by me); the numerous collaborations the artist had with record companies, singers and musical groups, signing absolutely rare covers already at the end of the 40s and others that soon entered rock history.
Following the liaison imaginaire between Naples and New York sought by Amelio at the time, the exhibition traces the nodes of an underground empathy between the promiscuous and multiracial, beautiful and damned underground of the US metropolis and the magmatic popular creativity of the historic capital of the Mediterranean. A territory always poised between death and rebirth, drama and comedy, artistic-cultural riches and kitsch junk, which once again manifests itself as a torn curtain on the interior scene of the contemporary.
