Celebrity Portraits from the Andy Warhol Factory @ the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Photo of Andy Warhol for Esquire May 1969. Art directed by George Lois.

TEL AVIV.- Andy Warhol's Factory (New York, 1963-1983) was one of the most famous centers of creativity in the history of contemporary art. The exhibition presents portraits of Warhol and some of his associates, taken at the Factory by Billy Name, Gerard Malanga, Carl Fischer and Curtis Knapp.
Warhol operated a machine for creating and elevating superstars, and transformed the way we view celebrity portraits through his paintings, his films, his magazine Interview, and the promotion of the numerous creative people in his circle. All the images Warhol produced – photograph-based silkscreens, film "screen tests", feature-length films and still photographs – were motivated by two main goals: the urge to capture and elevate personality, fame and celebrity, and the urge to create a momentary defense against time, the transience of life and death. The photographs of Warhol taken by Carl Fischer in 1969, after Warhol was wounded in an assassination attempt, reveal the physical scars left by the wounding as well as the vulnerability of his celebrity image.