Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol have historically been interpreted as opposites—the former a symbol of gestural and abstract painting, the latter an icon of pop art and mass production. This exhibition, however, invites us to dismantle that dichotomy and discover the points where their paths intersect, revealing a thread of continuity between them.
Although art history has presented these artists as distant and opposing figures, in reality their pictorial interests and concerns developed in parallel. Both explored space, repetition, abstraction, and seriality. Their paths lead in similar directions, even if they pursued them in stylistically distinct ways. Warhol admired Pollock, and both shared a preoccupation with reinventing space in painting. Their works are not limited to representing objects or scenes, but rather play with the relationship between figuration and abstraction, background and figure, layers and superimpositions.
The exhibition revolves around this dialogue between the two painters, a core theme that expands with contributions from other artists of their time. It brings together more than one hundred works—paintings, photographs, screen prints, and other techniques—from international collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Andy Warhol Museum, along with works from the Thyssen collections. These are complemented by creations from Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Sol LeWitt, Cy Twombly, and a group of essential artists from the American art scene: Lee Krasner, Audrey Flack, Anne Ryan, Marisol, Perle Fine, Hedda Sterne, and Helen
Frankenthaler.
All these voices engage in dialogue with each other to show that the boundary between one group and another is much more permeable than we usually imagine.
Bienvenida Estrella de Diego, curator of the exhibition, writes an essay in the catalogue taking a journey through the history of art in an unusual way: by focusing on the shoes depicted.
in some of the most emblematic works in the history of Western painting. For her, the shoes that linger on her gaze are almost a declaration of intent, a silent autobiography. From the delicate footwear of the Flemish Renaissance painter Jan van Eyck to Van Gogh's worn boots, this seemingly secondary detail becomes a gateway to understanding each artist's concerns and the meaning that art has held in each historical period.
From the 1951 documentary directed by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg about the work of Jackson Pollock, in which his shoes appear briefly, we associate the artist with dirty boots covered in paint drips. In Warhol's case, the shoe illustrations he created early in his career—elegant, delicate, high-heeled shoes—seem quite different from Pollock's.
This guide complements the curator's proposal and invites you to step into the artists' shoes and "take a walk" with them. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes is a way to imagine their life, to try to understand their perspective. We invite you to move between these two artists.
64 pages
Softcover or paperback binding, sewn with thread
Closed format: 150 x 180 mm
