ANDY WARHOL. PASSAGGIO IN ITALIA 1975 - 1987

Welcome to the exhibition.Before you begin, a few tips to make the most of your visit.Throughout the galleries you will find QR codes: the black-and-white ones give you access to the historical and critical notes on the works from the Crédit Agricole Italia Collections; the magenta ones open this playlist, with a series of audio insights into the context in which Warhol created the works on display, the documentary materials, photographic records and memorabilia in the exhibition.Enjoy the experience!

American Pop Art reshaped the way art was made and thought across Europe in the final decades of the 20th century. Continental artists could not ignore the Pop phenomenon and its prophet Andy Warhol: pushing back against it or embracing it, but never indifferent.Tadini, Cantafora, Morlotti, Zigaina, Nitsch, Stefanoni, Spoerri, Sottsass and many others make up the cultural landscape Warhol moves through during his time in Italy: a layered, living ecosystem of relationships, ideas and influences, in dialogue with the Crédit Agricole Italia Collections.

In 1975, Turin-based gallerist Luciano Anselmino gave Warhol an unusual commission: Ladies & Gentlemen, a series of screen prints based on Polaroid portraits of 13 trans women, each paid $50 a session. The show opened at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, then moved to Milan with a catalogue essay by Pier Paolo Pasolini.Anselmino was far more than an art dealer. He was a connector, bridging the Parisian Surrealists with Arte Povera and American Pop, and weaving together worlds that rarely met.

Repetition is at the heart of Warhol's work. The same face, the same object, the same image, returned to again and again with only the slightest variation. A vision of art rooted in multiplication, and screen printing was the technique that made it possible.It was, for Warhol, the perfect way to reflect a world already saturated with copies, where images look alike but never quite match. The artwork was no longer a unique object. It was a cultural product, endlessly replicable.

New York, the 1960s.On the fifth floor of 231 East 47th Street in Manhattan, the lights in Andy Warhol's studio never go out. Silver walls, the sharp smell of screen-printing ink, the Velvet Underground on permanent rotation. Artists, musicians, drag queens, poets and outsiders drift in unannounced and leave without saying goodbye.The Factory is film set, laboratory and endless party rolled into one. A refuge for those who don't fit anywhere else, where glamour and fragility share the same space and identities shift, blur and collide."I can never tell where the artificial ends and the real begins," says Warhol.This is where his art is born: in the noise, the chaos, the energy of a place where people become images and images become legend.

In 1985, eighteen unique screen prints from the Vesuvius cycle go on show at the Museo di Capodimonte. Warhol takes the iconic image of the volcano seen from the Gulf of Naples and pushes it into Pop territory, trading the quiet romanticism of the 19th century Scuola di Posillipo for neon and raw energy.His relationship with Naples, built over years alongside gallerist Lucio Amelio from 1976 onwards, drew him towards subjects charged with emotional weight: the volcano, ever-present and unpredictable, and the front page of Il Mattino carrying the headline Fate Presto in the aftermath of the Irpinia earthquake. Nature's violence and social violence converge, and Warhol fixes both in print: from deep, unrelenting black through to the full overexposure of the printing screen.

22 January 1987. Police are stationed along Corso Magenta, not because of an incident but because of an opening: Warhol. Il Cenacolo at the Refettorio delle Stelline. Warhol is received like a rock star, spending two hours signing posters, postcards, t-shirts and skin in a spontaneous body painting session. International jet-set, fashion, design and a crowd far beyond what the gallery's 500 square metres can hold.The evening is documented by Maria Mulas and Fabrizio Garghetti. It would prove to be the last public appearance for both Warhol and his gallerist Alexander Iolas, who both died later that year. Among the photographs, one stands out: Andy raising a small automatic Pentax to reply, with a single click, to Maria's shot.