Andy Warhol: São Paulo looks past the familiar faces

Recognition is only the beginning of looking at Warhol. The soup can and the celebrity portrait make an immediate entrance; the work becomes more complicated when film, photography and graphic design enter the room.

Andy Warhol: Pop Art, covered by WAYFARER in April 2025, was scheduled to open at MAB FAAP in São Paulo the following month. Works came from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, with Amber Morgan and Brazilian curator Priscyla Gomes sharing the curatorial responsibility. Instituto Totex organised the project.

The account described an exhibition moving across screenprints, sculpture, experimental film, photographs and installation. Campbell’s Soup and portraits associated with Marilyn, Mao and Elvis offered recognisable points of entry. Pelé placed a Brazilian figure within that circulating world of images.

Those names do not exhaust the subject. Warhol’s movement between music, fashion, cinema and design made it difficult to maintain a neat boundary around the artwork. Repetition became a way to ask how an image gains familiarity, and what familiarity does to its meaning. The exhibition dates belong to 2025 and are not an invitation to a current show. What the archive preserves is a curatorial proposition: start with the faces you know, then pay attention to the systems that made them familiar.