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ANDY IN NATURE EXHIBITION
Andy Warhol spent much of his life and career obsessed with fame, celebrity, media personas, and, in essence, all that was mass-produced and commercial. In the 1960s Warhol declared his greatest desire was to be “a machine” and built a public image that reinforced his sense of separateness through his physicality, as well as an air of affected cool detachment. He was pointedly unemotional and indifferent in public: like his can of soup, Warhol worked to turn himself into a famous symbol of mass production in late capitalist America. Following the success of Netflix’s The Andy Warhol Diaries series, this exhibit examines how Warhol’s rich and increasingly conflicted inner life led him to engage with nature through the photography and film footage of Christopher Makos, his closest friend and confidante. Though Warhol never publicly strayed from his urbane, whitewigged persona when he was away from Manhattan and the public eye, as Makos shows here, Warhol was able to relax in nature and embody a more sincere, stripped back self. Paul Solberg’s flower series riffs on Warhol’s own treatment of flowers. Andy in Nature is the latest collaboration between Solberg and Christopher Makos. Solberg’s delicate nods to the beauty of nature relate both to the Makos images of Andy in Nature as well as the exhibit venue, Forest Hall, which is the birthplace of the American Conservation Movement, which today is many efforts to protect and conserve our land and resources. As Andy once said, “Land really is the best art.”
