Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces

Andy Warhol's fascination with Jackson Pollock is well known; his obsession with having one of his works in his extensive art collection, as well as the relationship between his famous car crash series and the notorious accident that ended Pollock's life one night in August 1956.

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is organising an exhibition which brings together the work of these two key names of 20th-century art, shown alongside that of other artists who were reconsidering issues relating to the new spatial strategies at this same time. These are two extraordinarily complex figures, seemingly very different but in fact united, like an entire generation of artists, by their interest in change in the pictorial tradition, spatial issues and a fascination with large formats. 

The present opportunity to see the works in the galleries of the exhibition reveals that Jackson Pollock was not always an “abstract master”, nor was Warhol an artist solely occupied with dispassionate depictions of banal themes from popular culture. Halfway between abstraction and figuration, in their own way both proposed revisiting the concept of space and its use as a place of concealment and layering; both overturned the notion of the background and the figure, and both focused on an artistic project involving pictorial strategies which served them as camouflage. In both cases it was an autobiographical project to a certain extent for artists who worked on repetition, seriality and abstraction as a way of showing new ways of looking at the world they lived in. 

The exhibition catalogue, made possible through the support of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, includes texts by Estrella de Diego (curator) and Patrick Moore (Ex Director of The Warhol Museum) and the transcription of a conversation between Estrella de Diego, Guillermo Kuitca (Argentinian painter) and Guillermo Solana (Artistic Director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza). Available in Spanish and English.