The Silver Factory at Q Contemporary

To celebrate its 3rd anniversary, Q Contemporary will revive the American swinging sixties by re-creating Andy Warhol’s New York studio, The Factory, in Beirut. The exhibit will feature one of Warhol’s most iconic works of art: the original Marilyn Monroe series from 1967.

Andy Warhol (1928 -1987) was a leading artist in the visual art movement known as Pop Art, a genre that emerged in America and elsewhere in the 1950s to become prominent over the next two decades. His work explored the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisements.

Staying true to the artist’s bold personality, Q will be transformed into The Factory, Warhol’s original New York Studio from 1962 to 1968. In this period, he created numerous mass-produced images from photographs of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Jackie Onassis. In this famous Marilyn artwork on display, Warhol merged art with the culture of mass production. By creating multiple copies of her iconic image, Warhol transformed pop culture into art. Fascinated by death and the cult of celebrity, he generated brash, assembly-line paintings of Monroe symbolizing the mortal behind the myth, as well as her widespread presence in the media.

The work exhibited is on loan from the collection of Emmanuel Javogue, an internationally celebrated art collector and curator. Over the last three decades, as owner of several Parisian galleries, Javogue launched artists such as Basquiat, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman, Anish Kapoor and Dennis Oppenheim while also dealing in modern masters like Picasso, Matisse, Dali and Renoir.