Andy Warhol art exhibition opens in S'pore

Andy Warhol art exhibition opens in S'pore

It's been 25 years since Andy Warhol's death but his creations continue to make an impact on the global art scene.

And now, there's good news for Andy Warhol fans as more than 260 works of the Pop Art icon are in town at the ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands.

Titled 'Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal', the exhibition is the largest collection ever to be shown in Singapore.

For Warhol, art could come in many forms.

He showed the world how different production methods can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

ArtScience Museum senior project manager Lise MacDonald said: "He created a real bomb in the art world. He was an artist thinking ahead of any other people. He was definitely not the type of artist you could classify as conventional."

His works blurred the boundaries between art and advertisement, and crossed the lines between the bizarre and the beautiful.

And one example is the Cow Wallpaper which uses a cow motif for a wallpaper design.

"Precisely, it's strange, right?" said MacDonald. "The colours are very bold and they're complementary colours put together so it has a visual impact and effect that are very striking. And it's the idea of the repetition of the pattern... that's very frequent in his work. Why would one not look at a cow? Why would one not look at a Campbell's soup can?"

MacDonald was referring to Warhol's 1962 masterpiece '32 Campbell's Soup Cans' which was produced by a printmaking method known as semi-mechanized silkscreen process.

But unlike Warhol's silkscreen prints of canned soup, there will be other collections that are hand painted in the exhibition.

The works of three Southeast Asian artists - Jahan Loh from Singapore, Ibrahim Hussein from Malaysia and Jirapat Tatsanasomboom from Thailand - are also showcased as part of the exhibition.

Each one is a distinctive take on the influence of Andy Warhol and how he has changed the way we look at everything - including traditional art.

Singaporean visual artist Jahan Loh lived overseas in Taipei for eight years and what he missed the most was luncheon meat.

Loh said: "I chose a very common reference point which is canned food. It's clearly a tongue in cheek poke at Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup, but contextualised within our Singaporean, Asian context. Certain similarities are deliberate, but other things are very different if you look carefully. I think maybe Andy Warhol would have painted luncheon meat if he'd tasted it."

The exhibition runs till August 12, 2012 in Singapore and will head to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and finally to Tokyo in 2014.

~News courtesy of Channel Newsasia~