15 Dec ANDY WARHOL: The Day the Factory Died
On April 1, 1987, the day of Andy Warhol’s funeral commemoration in New York, photographer Christophe von Hohenberg received his first assignment from Vanity Fair magazine to photograph mourning miniskirts at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
That afternoon, von Hohenberg snapped more than 200 photographs of some of the most celebrated personalities who had frequented Andy’s Factory and Studio 54, and who attended the commemoration. Unfortunately none of them wore miniskirts that day and for this reason the service was canceled and the photographs were forgotten.
This until 2007, the year of the 20th anniversary of Warhol’s death, when Christophe’s black and white photographs were collected in a publication edited by writer and curator Charlie Scheips entitled “ANDY WARHOL: The Day the Factory Died”, in which there are also some texts written by the celebrities themselves as the photos and which tell anecdotes about the artist and the years of the Factory.
The exhibition presented at Metroquadro during the Christmas period offers a selection of Christophe von Hohenberg’s photographs collected in the catalog.
Documenting the conclusion of an extraordinary era and a unique experience such as that of Warhol’s Factory, the photographs present a succession of famous faces from the 70s and 80s, from Debby Harry to Yoko Ono, from Liza Minnelli to Leo Castelli , caught out of the spotlight, in a moment of grief, of intimacy, of “normality”.
An unusual exhibition, which documents a piece of the history of art and contemporary culture.
“Andy Warhol – The Day The Factory Died” was released in 2006 and in 2007 won the Photo District New Photography Book Award and AIGA Book Award.
The exhibition was exhibited at the Goss Gallery in Dallas, Texas 2006; the Rudolph Budja Gallery in Salzburg, Austria, 2007; America House in Munich, Germany, 2007 and Affirmation Arts in New York, 2008.