The exhibition in the Moravian Gallery in Brno maps, first and foremost, the presence of Warhol’s work in Slovak collections, both public and private. On the basis of Slovak collections, the public can now view samples of Warhol’s graphic art from all of his periods.
From the early 1960's until his death in 1987, Andy Warhol embodied a unique link between art, advertising, fashion, underground music, arthouse movies, experimental literature, gay community, the cult of celebrities and mass culture. Nobody before him (and, for that matter, after him) encompassed such a range of activities, in many aspects "touchless", self-organised and autonomous. Warhol remoulded the tension of glossy surface and drugs, addictions of all kinds, gender ambiguity and infernal noise into an area of desire. He introduced his own idea of the world, in which consumerism, the cult of stardom, money, surface appearances, repetition, absence of distinct moral values, wisecracks, parties and death made up a system of signs and internally referential images.
Despite the multitude of works that Andy Warhol produced, endless series of serigraphs, thousands of hours of film material and sound recordings, the plethora of unused objects from his collection stored in a house in which he only came to live in a single room, and notwithstanding all declarations that the point is not that things should be basically identical but that they should be genuinely identical, the artist's uniqueness and inimitability could never be dismissed. As a Creator infinitely multiplying the world by cloning, he remained, untouchable, above what he had created, or at least next to it. Those who met him emphasise that nobody could see through him. Warhol was and remains an empty aggregate, a free space of meanings in which interpretations brimming with disputes and doubts still evolve. The situation is no less complicated with the extensive volume of his work, defying the maxim that quantity decreases price.
Serigraphy is an art technique that nearly stands for a synonym for Andy Warhol's work. The artist's direct interference is only necessary in some stages; in addition, printing permits easy reproduction. The inclination to printing and reproduction that appear to disguise the individual projection of personality into a work of art can be understood as a response to abstract expressionism of the previous generation of artists. However, Warhol's attitude towards printing involves another shift, challenging traditions no less importantly. An artist usually observes the equality of individual prints, carefully choosing a workshop and supervising all phases of the printing process. Even in this respect, Warhol lived up to his approach to art as a "tool for getting rich and famous". He would occasionally allow others to select subjects and models, and charged his associates with the care for how the final prints would be executed, i.e. with the supervision over the last phase in commercial printing offices. Different variations and certain ambiguity in final prints spelt a quality with a high marketing potential.
