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Andy Warhol's 'fright wigs' go on display in UK for first time | |
(32 minutes later) | |
Tate Modern show features the late pop artist’s hairpieces along with 100 works | Tate Modern show features the late pop artist’s hairpieces along with 100 works |
Three precisely coiffured wigs Andy Warhol probably glued to his head because he feared they would “fly off” are to go on display in the UK for the first time. | |
Tate Modern will this week open its first big Warhol show for almost 20 years, featuring more than 100 works from his career. | |
Gregor Muir, the co-curator, said the London gallery wanted to display the wigs because they shone a unique light on the artist. | |
“They are incredible objects, which he would have had a say in, in terms of their design … the way they are dark at the back and blonde at the front,” he said. “The wigs are part of Warhol’s persona, and Warhol himself was an artwork.” | |
Muir recalled seeing the wigs for the first time at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and thinking they had to be part of the Tate show. “It was a little eerie, it has to be said but at the same time – it is him.” | |
Warhol was bald from his 20s and his early wigs were quite conservative. “They are a man who wants to blend in,” Muir said. As Warhol got older they became wilder, more silvery “and, in some ways, scarier”. | |
He used strong glues and lots of product, Muir said. “He was so fearful of the idea it would fly off.” | |
Next to the wigs is one of Warhol’s instantly recognisable “fright wig” self portrait, created in 1986. | |
Muir said: “You have to ask yourself, what has given him the fright? It is as if he has seen a ghost. I get very poetic here but perhaps he is his own ghost.” | |
The show includes a number of artworks that will go on display in the UK for the first time. They include Sixty Last Suppers, a 10-metre wide canvas created months before Warhol died. | |
The work is a meditation on death, immortality and the afterlife and has been hung in the exhibition’s final room, which is dark and feels more like a chapel. | |
Another is a large screen print of dozens of Marilyn Monroe’s lips from his Marilyn series, made months after she was found dead after a drugs overdose in 1962. | |
Warhol will be all over Tate Modern for the duration of the show, including a homage to his sweet tooth with a Death by Cheesecake pale ale available on draft and in cans. In the kitchen and bar there will be frozen hot chocolate, a nod to New York’s Serendipity Cafe, where it was the signature dessert. | |
Andy Warhol is at Tate Modern 12 March until 6 September. |
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