Andy Warhol – Daido Moriyama

January 19 – 28, 2024

DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present ten new works by Daido Moriyama, along with seven of Andy Warhol’s drawings from the 1950s, at the 2024 edition of The Winter Show, taking place in New York City from January 19th to 28th.
 
Andy Warhol moved to New York City in 1949, immediately after earning his bachelor’s degree. He quickly made a name for himself in the sphere of commercial art, making illustrations for advertising campaigns and fashion magazines. The city shaped Warhol’s career, and during his first decade there he allowed himself to follow a dual approach to his art, a dichotomy that can be clearly seen in these drawings. On the one hand, he established his own personal freehand style, instinctive and thoughtful; on the other, he
began creating images that were easily reproducible and in unmistakable conversation with the world of advertising into which he had stepped. It was also during this phase of his career that Warhol developed his ‘blotted line’ technique, which allowed him to present a variety of different versions of his advertising ideas to clients.
 
Moriyama’s new works are the products of a richly complex process of creation, too. His typical approach to work involves walking through the streets around him, impulsively photographing his surroundings to capture the essence of any place he finds himself in. During his monthlong trip to New York in 1971, Moriyama employed a 35mm “half-frame”
camera, meaning that each negative frame would in fact hold two, halfsized individual exposures. Each ‚complete image‘ shows the subject in two facets captured moments apart. The artist captured over 2,000 images this way.
 
In 2023, Moriyama used a screen-printing technique to transfer a selection of these dual images onto large, individual canvases. The resulting works showcase Moriyama’s long-standing interest in the concept of “are, bure, bokeh”– roughly translatable as “rough, coarse, out-of-focus” – which, here,illuminates, evoked in shimmering bronzes and blacks, the atmosphere of a New York at night.
 
Moriyama’s 2023 creations still carry all the spontaneity of his work in 1971. His return to the series after more than fifty years also shows his rethinking of the artistic process and his experimenting with possibilities of repetition. He was surely also inspired by Andy Warhol’s concept of “seriality”. In fact, it was Warhol himself who lured Moriyama to New York in the first place and Moriyama photographed him at the time.
 
Our Winter Show exhibition for 2024 is able to show how these two artists respond to the city in ways that both diverge and intersect, that distinguish themselves and occasionally overlap. Warhol and Moriyama were both drawn to New York’s zeal for commerce and advertising – Warhol to Madison Avenue, where he found success as a commercial
artist, and Moriyama to the bright lights and neon signs of the city itself (recurring motifs found not only in this series but across his entire oeuvre). The use of street photography, Moriyama’s defining genre, was also a part of Warhol’s artistic process, as was the use of a range of loosely categorizable subjects including cats, cars, and flowers. We can see how these motifs came to engage Moriyama as well as he explored the city, whether wandering the Flower District or the corridors of his hotel. Both artists also clearly felt drawn to pay particular attention to the city’s fire hydrants: Moriyama photographs one in the instants before it is lost in clouds of New York City street steam, while Warhol flanks his hydrants with two women’s cartoonish legs, seemingly leaning against the red iron. Those female feet bear shoes of special noteworthiness: they are drawn in the same style that earned Warhol his job as the ‘sole’ illustrator for the I. Miller shoe company between 1955 and 1957.
 
DOWNLOAD press release Winter Show 2024  
 
Opening Night Party:
January 18, 2024, 5 – 9 pm
Young Collectors Night:
January 25, 2024, 6 – 9 pm
Connoisseurs Night:
January 26, 2024, 5:30 – 8 pm
Opening Hours:

Friday, Jan. 19, 12 pm – 8 pm
Saturday, Jan. 20, 12 pm – 7 pm
Sunday, Jan. 21, 12 pm – 6 pm
Monday, Jan. 22, 12 pm – 8 pm
Tuesday, Jan. 23, 12 pm – 5 pm
Wednesday, Jan. 24, 12 pm – 8 pm
Thursday, Jan. 25, 12 pm – 5 pm
Friday, Jan. 26, 12 pm – 8 pm
Saturday, Jan. 27, 12 pm – 7 pm
Sunday, Jan. 28, 12 pm – 6 pm

Visit Website: The Winter Show
 
The 70th edition of The Winter Show will be held in the historic Park Avenue Armory where a breadth of works spanning 5,000 years will be presented by over 68 internationally renowned dealers. Myriad works from paintings and works on paper, fine furniture, and design, to jewelry, and contemporary ceramics and glass will be on view. Famed for its rigorous vetting practices carried out by a committee of 120 experts, the Fair’s exhibitors offer works of the highest standards of authenticity and quality in the industry.
 
illustration: © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
 
and © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery, Tokyo