Germano Celant - Superwarhol - 2003

SuperWarhol offers an unprecedented look at the artist’s monumental works and large installations—some works over 12 metres long—from the early 1960s through 1986.
SuperWarhol offers an unprecedented look at the artist’s monumental works and large installations—some works over 12 metres long—from the early 1960s through 1986. “Size is a form of thinking”, declared the artist in one of his writings. This is without a doubt an essential part of his work. Warhol focuses his attention on a dimension expansible to the maximum power of the image, until it becomes abstraction, as in the spectacular series he began in the late 1960s.
From the Shadows (1978), Oxidations (1978), and Rorschach paintings (1984), all the way to the works of 1986: the Camouflage paintings and the series dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
In addition to these monumental paintings, the volume examines a selection of the artist’s historic works, those that serve as inspiring elements and iconographic references to his activity, and reveals, in a series of sections articulated around his large works, his interest in another type of monumentality linked to mass diffusion. An insatiable creator, Warhol made use of all possible creative supports and left us a colossal artistic heritage, from cinema to photography, from video to the press (magazines and publications), from design to television. An uncommon global vision for an artist who emphasized that “quantity is the best gauge of anything”.
This richly illustrated exhibition catalogue is edited by Germano Celant and designed by the Italian graphic artist Pierluigi Cerri.