Andy Warhol’s Lenin
Phillips is pleased to announce Andy Warhol’s Lenin, a selling exhibition that brings together original works on canvas, collages and works on paper from the Archive of Galerie Klüser. As Andy Warhol’s publisher and gallerist, Galerie Klüser has been at the forefront of the global art scene and the collection represents a historical artefact of the American pop artist’s relationship to portraiture. Bernd Klüser was instrumental in exposing Warhol to Lenin’s image at a later stage in the artist’s career. As this series of nine works demonstrates, Bernd Klüser encouraged Warhol to experiment through different media to develop the portrait image. The exhibition opens to the public from 26 September to 4 October 2019, and highlights will be on display in Phillips’ Berkeley Square galleries during the September Editions auction preview from 5 to 12 September.
Warhol’s last series of pictures before he died took Lenin as its subject. Bernd Klüser’s collaboration with the artist concerning this subject started in the spring of 1986, when he showed Warhol an unusual photograph of Lenin. The photograph portrayed Lenin as a self-assured, forceful young man; a pile of book indicating his occupation as an intellectual and political theorist.
