From December last year to 24 April, The National Gallery Of Victoria International held an exhibition showcasing works by Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei.
For the final day, NGV opened the exhibit for 24 hours. The works consisted of both famous and lesser known works from both artists, and held an interestingly juxtaposed space in which political ideas pushed and pulled pop and vice versa. The colours were grand and the interactional pieces held the attention of visitors.
When walking into the exhibition, you were immediately greeted with familiar Warhol art pieces including the famous Marilyn screen print and some self portraits. The work also intermingled with some Weiwei pieces as well. The works seemed to be placed almost sporadically throughout and I felt a tad confused as to where to go first. I felt the need to see it all at once, to digest it quickly.
The art works on display were a range of mixed media and different art forms like sculpture, film, screen printing, photography and digital art. There were adequate explanations adorning the walls as well, offering deeper insights to the works of arts, as some were quite difficult to pin down or draw out a finer, political clarification that Warhol and Weiwei loved/ love to include and express.
There was a few parts dedicated to a floating balloon stage that patrons could interact with: touch and feel. They were modelled after the Twitter symbol and an alpaca, which showed the political mocking of China and social media.
At the end of the second half of the exhibition there was an Andy Warhol Photo Booth in which I got to take some lovely memento photos. The grain and the editing of the photo was very Warhol-esque, and gave me a great feeling of nostalgia.
The pop-up shop also offered a range of products that tied in to the exhibition's material quite well, and was refreshing to know that art and commerce was something that Warhol was very fond of himself. So it lessened the blow that sometimes an artist's work might be commodified into readily digestible and common-type products for almost anyone to have.
Overall it was an exhibition you were most likely to have seen twice, and it was a grand way to bring back such amazing and relevant works of Warhol and combining them with Weiwei’s current political agenda and expression.
