Transmitting Andy Warhol

A new show at Tate Liverpool is set to explore this idea of Warhol’s influence on design, commerce and gift-shops the world over, not only in creating art, but in distributing it to a wide audience.

Entitled Transmitting Andy Warhol, the exhibition will show more than 100 works with the aim of exploring the artist’s role in finding new ways to disseminate art. It is, perhaps, inviting an audience living in a post-digital world to compare these pre-internet methods with the quick-fire propagation we’re used to today.

The obvious focus is on Warhol’s experiments in mass-produced imagery – both in his subject matter, taking instantly recognisable images like celebrities, or the banal, such as soup, as their starting point – or in the way they were produced.

Using serial repetition, Warhol’s working method reflected his style, underpinning, says the Tate, his maxim that “art should be for everyone”.

As well as paintings, the show will also present Warhol’s film, music and broadcasting words, including a recreation of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – his “total art environment” used for performances by The Velvet Underground.

Tate Liverpool says: “Transmitting Andy Warhol provides audiences with new insights into the breadth of his artistic processes and philosophies, as well as the social, political and aesthetic implications of his practice…

“By presenting Warhol in the context of the mass information networks of his time, the exhibition reveals the artist’s role in redefining access to culture and art as we understand it today, while challenging the traditional separation between high and low culture, and private and mass experience.”

Transmitting Andy Warhol runs from 7 November – 8 February 2015 at Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool L3 4BB