In recent weeks you might have seen posters advertising the Andy Warhol Three Times Out exhibition at Hugh Lane; it’s been heavily promoted throughout the city. The banners need only display Warhol’s name, and his most iconic image – a screen-printed Marilyn – to instantly trigger recognition.
Warhol has become one of those rare artists who holds icon status not only within the art world but outside of it. His own image – the glasses, the hair – is as much a part of the Warhol brand as the art itself. “Three Times Out” not only acknowledges Warhol’s global notoriety, but revels in it. The exhibition is a colourful, bombastic, gleeful experience. I found myself almost overwhelmed by seeing his most iconic pieces crammed together in so few rooms.
“Warhol has become one of those rare artists who holds icon status not only within the art world but outside of it”
When you enter the exhibition, you pass through an immersive experience created by Warhol in 1966. Huge silver helium balloons float through the room, which is one of the smallest in the exhibition. You’re encouraged to interact and play with them, infusing the subsequent rooms with a sense of whimsy and fun which might otherwise be lacking. Disappointingly, this is the only immersive piece in the exhibition.
The rooms of the gallery vaguely follow the stages of Warhol’s creative life, opening with his “transient” years in New York, where his career in advertising began. His ink drawings and sketches are haphazard, many half-finished, and framed on the wall with the kind of care and reverence they would never have had at the time. While most of his work is presented as Warhol would have intended, the small touches of Hugh Lane’s influence are wonderful. Some of his later prints, of Mao and of himself, have been made into facsimiles by the Warhol Museum, and Hugh Lane has used the reproductions as wallpaper. They join the white airy rooms together with a connecting line of bright purples and greens.
In the second room, his best-known contributions to the Pop Art movement are on display. Photo-silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell Soup stretch across the walls, though his largest print, Dollar Sign, draws the eye first. The space is loud and dissonant, like Pop Art was supposed to be. The 1967 Marilyn prints, as famous as they are, are almost a letdown when you see them in person, their colours somewhat dwarfed by the discordant colours of the Mao prints on the converging wall.
Moving onwards, you pass through his Flowers series – a room almost exclusively dedicated to Warhol’s master-level command of colour – and his first piece featuring Elizabeth Taylor. In his first Self Portrait series, a grid of Warhol’s face, he’s clearly posing, half of his face obscured in shadow. The bright colours obscure much of the minutiae of his face, but it’s unmistakably him.
“The exhibition’s increasing focus room-by-room on the morbid and the political was an incredible piece of storytelling”
His long standing interest in celebrities is best seen in his silver works: his bright colours of former rooms fall away and are suddenly replaced with matte black and silver prints of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. These, along with his Suicide series, a blurry and chaotic but monochrome collection, allow Gallery 14 to shift the tone of the exhibition.
Warhol experimented with allowing prints to degrade over their production. From here on out, Hugh Lane shows us series that warp and degrade, as this visual biography moves forwards to darker and more disturbed periods of Warhol’s creative life. Galleries 13 and 12 are all political works, referencing the Cold War, the civil unrest of the 1960s, and his own shooting by Valerie Solanas in 1968.
One standout here is the Electric Chair series: prints of an electric chair, alone in a shadowed room, each print degraded in garish colours. Instead of being laid out in a grid format like most of the other print series, it’s a serial, giving the viewer who must walk past each in turn a feeling of drudgery. It’s a sort of dark answer to the commercial glee of his Pop-Art prints, and in An Seomra Mór, next to Birmingham Race Riot, it’s uniquely haunting.
In his 1986 Self Portraits, the Warhol we see is a far cry from the cool, shadowed figure in his 1966 prints. With his now iconic tufty bleached hair, piercing eyes, and slack jaw, Warhol’s close-up face would unsettle me even if it hadn’t been blown up larger than life here. The splatters of paint on these black canvases suggest unrest, or even aggression: Warhol has begun to use his own image to challenge the viewer. At the same time, Hugh Lane offered up feverish clips from Warhol’s 1980s TV shows.
The Irish Times claims that this exhibition took five years to plan and complete. I’m not surprised: it’s a mammoth exhibition, spanning decades and made up of about 250 pieces from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pennsylvania, the Estate of Peter Beard, and Hugh Lane’s own archive of Francis Bacon. The exhibition uses creative collaboration and correspondence with Beard as a way to create a connection between Bacon and Warhol and a throughline between Three Times Out and Hugh Lane’s permanent exhibition. This means, though, that Hugh Lane had to collect the most well-known pieces from three of the most well-known artists of the 20th century.
Chronicles of his collaboration with other vibrant 20th century artists might have left us on a hopeful note if it weren’t for Gallery 8 and Gallery 1. These rooms conclude the exhibition; they screen his films from the 1960s, over and over. Barbara Dason and Michael Dempsey, Hugh Lane’s Director and Head of Exhibitions respectively, want attendees to see Three Times Out as a narrative of “Warhol’s concentration of perennial themes”, namely his preoccupation with death and the tragedy of existence. Though I was pleased to recognise some of the faces in this room – Edie Sedgwick featured notably – I found myself drained by the time I reached the end of the exhibition. These black and white silent films demand a lot of the viewer; many focus on one image for hours at a time. After so much visual noise and excitement earlier, I lacked the Herculean levels of attention and patience needed to engage with the films as artworks.
The exhibition’s increasing focus room-by-room on the morbid and the political was an incredible piece of storytelling – but it ensured I left the gallery emotionally exhausted. Thankfully, the gift shop is only a few metres away, where I played with a Keith Haring finger puppet until I was less aware of the tragedy of my own existence.
