Closed format: 23 x 30 cm Pages: 152 pages Contents: 94 works from the catalogue. Includes an essay by Estrella de Diego, curator of the exhibition; an essay by Patrick Moore, former director of the Warhol Museum; and a conversation/interview with Estrella de Diego and Cristina Iglesias, an internationally renowned Spanish artist and sculptor. Authors: Estrella de Diego, Patrick Moore, Guillermo Kuitca, and Guillermo Solana.
Paperback in Spanish.
ISBN 9791387729097
Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza from 21 October 2025 to 25 January 2026.
Traditionally, art history has presented Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and therefore each of their most well-known representatives—Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol—as polar opposites belonging to two distinct eras and styles: abstraction and figurative art. What's more, Pollock has been portrayed as an artist within the genealogy of great creators, inspired and original, while for some, Warhol has been a simple appropriationist of images and consumer objects. What if things were actually different? What if there were similarities between Warhol and Pollock, beyond the former's oft-mentioned fascination with the latter? After all, Pollock was also a pictorial celebrity when Warhol arrived on the scene. He was a famous artist, and he died in 1956 in a modern and inexplicable car accident, at the height of his career, just like James Dean.
Rarely discussed is how Pollock and Warhol—and with them many other artists of that time—moved between abstractionism and figuration at different points in their careers. Nor does anyone seem to pay attention to how returns in visuality never return to the starting point or arrive without transformations. The perspective invented by the Italian Quattrocento—the vanishing point that governs Western space in figurative art—is completely rewritten in some of Pollock's works, and this subversion of traditional perspective marks Warhol's spaces when he considers returning to figuration that is, to a certain extent, ambiguous, flat, and without a clear vanishing point.
If Pollock's abstractions retain figurative vestiges, Warhol's figurations shatter traditional space—the figure of Elvis, seemingly floating above a bottomless background, is a good example. Perhaps in his works, Warhol speaks of space, not just of consumer objects and figures. In recent years, conventional art history has been read and reread; it has rescued forgotten artists, countries with supposedly secondary roles, or historical moments long dismissed for their lesser relevance to visual art and its evolution. Now, perhaps, the time has come to break down the categories that govern thinking based on opposites that often aren't so.
In the end, history is a journey. A line, a thread that Pollock pursues in his paintings and that Warhol takes up again. For the first time in dialogue, Warhol and Pollock—along with other great American artists—invite us to look again.
Text by Estrella de Diego (exhibition curator)
