Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces
Press release
The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is organising an exhibition that brings together the work of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, two key figures in 20th-century art who focused on issues relating to new spatial strategies. Like other artists of that generation also present in the exhibition, they were united by their interest in changes in the pictorial tradition, spatiality and, in some cases, the use of large formats.
The works featured in the exhibition reveal how Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was not always an “abstract master”, while also presenting a more complex Andy Warhol (1928–1987) than the artist of dispassionately depicted, banal themes from popular culture. Midway between the abstract and the figurative, in their own way both set out to reassess the concept of space and its use as a place of concealment; a space revisited through repetition and seriality. Pollock and Warhol disrupted the notion of background and figure and developed a project which, through its very pictorial strategies, had something of camouflage about it. Frequently present in the works of both artists are traces and vestiges that refer to certain autobiographical aspects.
The exhibition, which has benefited from the collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid and the City Council of Madrid, features more than one hundred works, many of which have never previously been seen in Spain. Loaned from around thirty institutions in the United States and Europe, they include works by Warhol and Pollock as well as other artists such as Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Marisol Escobar, Sol LeWitt and Cy Twombly. Among them, Brown and Silver I by Pollock, Express by Robert Rauschenberg and Untitled (Green on Maroon) by Mark Rothko are all from the Thyssen collection.
