Ashmolean Museum: Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Price, Liu Dan For 2016 Programme

The Ashmolean Museum is to present Andy Warhol: Works From The Hall Collection, this spring exhibition will display, for the first time in public, an important private collection of works by Andy Warhol (1928‒1987). Cultural icon, celebrity and provocateur, Warhol produced images which are instantly recognisable, but this exhibition, through the lens of a private collection, also reveals an unfamiliar side to the artist in his less well-known works.

The exhibition features over a hundred works from the Hall Collection (USA), plus loans of artist films from the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal, it spans Warhol’s entire output from iconic pieces of the ‘60s Pop pioneer to the experimental works of his last decade.

Andy Warhol: Works From The Hall Collection – 4 February to 15 May 2016.

Elizabeth Price, winner of the 2013 Contemporary Art Society Award, has created a new work in response to the collections and archives of the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers museums. The new commission is a twenty minute, two-screen digital video which employs the museums’ photographic and graphic archives. It is a fiction, set to melody and percussion, which is narrated by a ‘chorus’ of museum administrators who are organising the records of Arthur Evans’s excavation of the Cretan city of Knossos.

The administrators use Evans’s extraordinary documents and photographs to figuratively reconstruct the Knossos Labyrinth within the museum’s computer server. They then imagine its involuted space as a virtual chamber through which museum objects digitally flow, clatter and cascade.

Elizabeth Price: The Contemporary Art Society Award Gallery 33 – 4 February to 10 April 2016.

Liu Dan (b. 1953) is one of China’s leading artists, at the forefront of the generation of painters who have been working in radically new ways in the traditional medium of ink. He is exceptional in combining themes current since the Song dynasty using his own techniques derived from 14th-century artists.

His paintings are meticulous, and very often huge in scale. He is equally interested in Italian drawing of the 14th to 16th centuries as much as their Yuan and Ming dynasty contemporaries, and aspects of their work are subsumed in his. The exhibition will include a landscape presented by Liu Dan to the Ashmolean in memory of the great historian of Chinese art, Professor Michael Sullivan (1916–2013).

LIu DAN: Chinese Paintings Gallery – 18 October 2016 to 26 February 2017.

Lead image: Self Portrait, 1967, Hall Collection © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc; the Artists Rights Society, New York; DACS London.

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