Art News

The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art Hosts "Surrounding Bacon and Warhol"

artwork: Francis Bacon - "Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus", 1981 - Oil on canvas - 218.5 x 167.5 x 7.5 cm. Collection of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. On view in "Surrounding Bacon and Warhol" until October 2nd.


Oslo.- The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art is proud to present “Surrounding Bacon and Warhol”, on view at the museum until October 2nd. This exhibition takes Francis Bacon (1909–1991) and Andy Warhol (1928–1987) as its starting point. Bacon and Warhol were two great artists of the 20th century with very different approaches to creativity, to the processes of working, to the nature of images and to the notion of art in general. Bacon, who painted in the first person, transferred his visceral energy and enigmatic symbols and metaphors directly to the canvas, while Warhol, who worked in the third person, adopted existing forms and figures from the media and made them his own through various techniques of reproduction. And while Bacon belonged to a long and rich tradition of Expressionistic painters, Warhol marked the beginning of a new, more distanced development in contemporary art – Pop. Both produced meaningful works, however, that are ambiguous, complex and highly influential.

artwork: Andy Warhol - "Rorschach", 1984 Synthetic polymer paint & silkscreen inks on canvas - 304 x 244 cm. Collection of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. © Andy Warhol Foundation. In this exhibition, key works by Bacon and Warhol will engage in an intelligent dialogue with those by some of the many different painters who have worked on the borderline between these two artistic languages, developing their own vocabularies with an emphasis on the manipulation and transgression of images, creating direct and indirect actions and narratives. On the one hand, the spectator will be drawn into the seduction of a painterly expression that often adopts a provocative thematic, and on the other, will be challenged by the philosophical approach of artists who distance themselves from their subject matter. The result are a fascinating exploration of the reach and influence of these two important tendencies in painting – Expressionism and Pop art – during the 20th century and beyond. Artists featured in the exhibition include Eduardo Arroyo, Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Ross Bleckner, Bjørn Carlsen, Patrick Caulfield, Mirodrag Djuric Dado, Jim Dine, Carroll Dunham, Erró, Øyvind Fahlström, David Hockney, Jörg Immendorf, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Jens Johannessen, Allen Jones, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Ronald Brooks Kitaj, Markus Lüpertz, Malcolm Morley, Odd Nerdrum, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Larry Rivers, Knut Rose, Bjørn-Sigurd Tufta, Vladimir Velickovic and Andy Warhol.

Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art is a private art museum founded in October 9, 1993. The museum is based on an exquisite collection of international contemporary art. The collections main focus is the American appropriation artists from the 1980s, but it is currently developing towards the international contemporary art scene, with artists like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, Tom Sachs, Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson and Cai Guo-Qiang. The museum gives 4-5 temporary exhibitions each year. Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern art aims at being an international museum of high quality. The museum collaborates with international institutions, and produces exhibitions that travels worldwide. The Astrup Fearnley Museum is also very much preoccupied with relations between the museum and the public, and have recently been able to offer free admission. The museum is working towards new communication structures with information via mobile telephone and museum hosts. The museum collection is based on a private collection that goes back thirty years, and has developed with the changes in modern/contemporary art. There has been an interest in German Abstract Expressionism, English modern painting, and the “Young British Artists” to mention a few areas. Presently the collection is orientated towards the young American art scene. It also encompasses works pertaining to the steadily increasing global art community. The main areas of curatorial expertise in the museum are art from the 1960s to the present, including American and European pop-art, post modern appropriation art of the 1980s and international contemporary art. Visit the museum’s website at … http://afmuseet.no