Andy Warhol

Tate Modern show features the late pop artists hairpieces along with 100 works

Tue 10 Mar 2020 11.22 EDT

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 Warhols 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 Warhols 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 exhibitions final room, which is dark and feels more like a chapel.

Another is a large screen print of dozens of Marilyn Monroes 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 Yorks Serendipity Cafe, where it was the signature dessert.

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Andy Warhol's 'fright wigs' go on display in UK for first time - The Guardian