The largest ever Andy Warhol exhibition in Ireland opens this weekend, featuring 250 works of art including the iconic Campbell's soup cans, flowers and Marilyn Monroe.
The exhibition, Andy Warhol Three Times Out, was five years in the making and includes artwork borrowed from museums and private collections around the world.
A broad range of his work has been selected from the iconic Campbell's Soup Cans, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy and Chairman Mao works, to his multiple self-portraits along with skulls and electric chairs.
His avant garde films Empire, Sleep, Kiss and Outer and Inner Space will also be on display.
Visitors to the exhibition, which opens in the Hugh Lane Gallery on Friday, will also experience Warhol's immersive Silver Clouds sculpture.
The exhibition is curated by Barbara Dawson, director of Hugh Lane Gallery who said it shows how Warhol "utterly changed the way the world experiences art".
"His work explored the relationship between artistic expression and the flourishing consumer culture of the 1960s, new technology and celebrity status, as well as mortality, in a diverse body of works that underpins his artistic genius."
She said many of his themes are relevant today.
"As society navigates the age of social media and surveillance capitalism - how our data is being captured and monetised - it is impossible to overlook Warhol’s prescient vision so relevant to us today," she said.
Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 to immigrant parents from Slovakia.
He moved to New York in 1949, where he became one of America’s leading commercial artists.
By the early 1960s he had moved into the field of fine art and was exhibiting his Pop Art paintings in New York and Los Angeles.
He set up the legendary Silver Factory in the 1960s from here he promoted the rock band, The Velvet Underground.
Vincent Fremont met Andy Warhol in 1969 and went on to become firm friends and executive manager of Andy Warhol's studio.
Attending the press preview of the exhibition in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Mr Frement recounted meeting Warhol in New York on Woodstock weekend.
"I felt very lucky even then to work with one of the great artists of the 20th century. I always tell people when they ask about my education that I went to the great university of Andy Warhol," he said.
Unique to the exhibition will be a section focusing on the work and collaborations both Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon had with acclaimed US artist and photographer Peter Beard.
The Gallery said this provokes "new thinking on the status of these two titans of the 20th century".
The 250 works are on loan from museums and private collections in the US, Canada, Europe, and the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Michael Dempsey, the head of exhibitions, says as a result of the lenders "we have a unique exhibition here in Dublin".
He said "when you put a Campbell Soup can beside a large dollar sign, it says something that Andy was trying to say in the 60s".
"These are 60s images, but they have become iconic for us today. We have the commodification of the artwork."
Mr Dempsey described Warhol as a "great trickster, he was the prankster of the art world, you never quite knew where you stood with this artist because he was always performing his role, who he was, who an artist was".
The ticketed exhibition opens on Friday and runs until 28 January.
