Andy Warhol’s Pictures and Movies Get a Uncommon Highlight at Rutgers

BYLINE: Mike Lucas

Andy Warhol’s images is prepared for its close-up at Rutgers, a few of it for the primary time.  

The Zimmerli Art Museum’s newest exhibition, Andy Warhol: On Repeat, brings collectively the American artist’s early durational movies and later serial images to look at repetition and length as central forces in his artwork.

On Repeat opens Wednesday, Feb. 11, and continues via July 31 within the Voorhees Gallery of the museum at 71 Hamilton St., New Brunswick, N.J. The exhibition consists of almost 70 black-and-white images and colour Polaroids from the Zimmerli’s assortment – some on view for the primary time – in addition to a set of movies on mortgage from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

A reception will probably be held throughout SparkNight from 5 p.m. to eight p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 12. Additional occasions embody Polaroid workshops on March 11 and April 16 and a household workshop on April 12. More particulars can be found on the Zimmerli’s events webpage. The exhibition and the occasions are free. 

Organized by Jeremiah William McCarthy, the Zimmerli’s chief curator and curator of American artwork, On Repeat “offers a rare look at how Warhol used time, stillness and seriality to chart the shifting terrain of identity,” museum officers famous in an announcement.

McCarthy discusses the exhibition, Warhol’s images and a connection between the artist, the rock band the Velvet Underground and Rutgers.

What impressed you to border this exhibition round “repetition” and “duration” as central forces in Warhol’s artwork?

They’re each so key to Warhol’s artwork, whether or not speaking about his pop work just like the Brillo bins or soup cans, or his movie and images.

It’s 2026, and everyone seems to be experiencing media fatigue or combating consideration and distraction. Repetition and length are two strategies artists and others use to fight this. Warhol’s genius was to anticipate our media-saturated panorama. 

How is On Repeat completely different from different Warhol exhibitions? 

I feel in some methods this isn’t the normal Warhol present. There are not any electrical chairs, Marilyns or Elvises. Even the “Screen Tests” I’ve chosen aren’t the same old ones. There are a number of Warhol exhibitions every year, so it is best to discover one thing new to say when you’re going to arrange one.  

How did you resolve which images finest illustrate Warhol’s exploration of id via time, stillness and seriality? 

I select photograph pairs and multiples that illustrate how repetition permits a picture to slide from the acquainted to the uncanny.  

For Warhol, repetition didn’t simply sharpen notion a lot as put on it down, revealing how overexposure can boring consideration even because it multiplies photos. The longer Warhol’s digicam lingered, the extra it uncovered and hid. 

Can you share an instance of a photograph that shocked you in the course of the curatorial course of?  

There is a photograph within the exhibition that, in the course of the 12 months I labored on the present, I will need to have checked out almost 100 occasions. Only across the ninetieth time did I discover that the topic is doing one thing somewhat provocative together with his fingers.

Everyone I’ve proven the {photograph} to has the identical expertise till I level out this element. It completely illustrates the earlier level: Sometimes the extra you look, the extra you see, and different occasions repeated trying results in overlooking.

The exhibition makes use of large-scale projections and vertical towers of Polaroids. How do these design decisions improve a customer’s expertise of Warhol’s concepts?

Large-scale projections enable a customer to actually transfer into the picture, to indulge in it. It makes it extra seemingly for folks to note the movie. We tried to make the galleries snug with bean baggage, and we would like viewers to linger.

In this exhibition, we’re exhibiting one in every of Warhol’s movies known as “Outer and Inner Space” at 16 toes throughout. It isn’t an overestimation to say this work incorporates all of the themes of Warhol’s artwork: actuality and illustration, portraiture and movie star, life and dying, and repetition and length. I can’t look ahead to folks to spend time with it.

Speaking of tourists, what do you hope they acquire from the exhibition?

It’s my hope that the present slows them down a bit, that it makes it extra seemingly for them to note the ability of photos on this planet exterior the gallery.

There is a connection between Warhol, the Velvet Underground and Rutgers. What is it? 

There are a few Warhol-Rutgers connections.

He got here to Rutgers in 1966. During that point, he was doing a collection of happenings known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, in addition to different occasions with the Velvet Underground and Nico. The EPI was a mixture of projections, go-go dancers, completely different sorts of performances and light-weight artwork, and so forth.

Warhol additionally designed a print of Old Queens. 

Theresa Watson contributed to this text.