Skip to content

Installations

Installation view of "Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol"

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025.

Art © Succession Alberto Giacometti / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY [1961] / © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025.

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025.

Art © Billy Al Bengston / Art by Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025.

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025.

Art © Tom Sachs/ © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / © 2025 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025.

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025.

Art / © 2025 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / © Tom Sachs / © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / © 2025 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025., Art © 2025 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. / © 2025 Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Installation view of Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, New York, January 21 - March 21, 2025.

Art © 2025 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. / © 2025 Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Press Release

New York, NY – Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol, a group exhibition exploring portraiture, with paintings and sculptures spanning over a century and different styles of representation, from Impressionism to today. Artists include Francis Bacon, Billy Al Bengston, Pierre Bonnard, Dominic Chambers, Jean Dubuffet, Nicole Eisenman, Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti, Damian Loeb, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Chris Ofili, Tom Sachs, Wayne Thiebaud, Édouard Vuillard, Andy Warhol, and Hannah Wilke. The exhibition opened at the gallery’s Palm Beach location November 20th, 2024, and will open in New York January 21st, 2025.

Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol brings together works that delve into the techniques and methods that artists have utilized to represent their subjects in portraiture. Showing works by artists across the spectrum of the Impressionist, modern, and contemporary periods, the exhibition reflects the disparate ways of seeing and portraying, with a particular focus on the relationship between painter and model. Through these varying perspectives, the simulacrum undergoes shifts and transformations that illustrate the breadth of portraiture while delving into the genre’s inherent intimacy.

Among the selection of artworks is Andy Warhol’s iconic Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) (1986). Created during the penultimate year of Warhol’s life, the silkscreen painting ranks among the artist’s most recognized and familiar images. Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) is complemented by an earlier self-portrait by the artist, Self-Portrait (1964), offering two starkly different representations of the artist at different moments in his life. Created at the outset of his career, the 1964 painting marks a starting point for Warhol’s career-long engagement with the construction of identity as it pertained to composing his public persona. The 1986 work, from his final series of portraits, continues Warhol’s enduring conflict between self and icon, private and public. In Fright Wig, Warhol embodies the kind of constructed self-projection that was crucial to his public façade.

fright wig

ANDY WARHOL

Self-Portrait (Fright Wig), 1986

Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas

80 x 76 inches (203.2 x 193.0 cm)

© 1986 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

lorette

HENRI MATISSE

Tête de femme penchée (Lorette), 1916-1917

Oil on panel

13 x 9 1/2 inches (33 x 24.1 cm)

© 2025 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matisse’s Tête de femme penchée (Lorette) (1916-1917) is one of nearly fifty paintings the artist made of Italian model and muse, “Lorette,” between 1916 and 1917. During World War One, the artist began to veer closer than ever before into abstraction, until his series of paintings of Lorette ushered in softer, warmer tonalities and a return to representation, qualities that had begun to disappear from Matisse’s practice for a brief period following 1913. Lorette was a pivotal figure for Matisse’s career, awakening newfound energy in the artist and transforming his work back to a naturalistic mode reinvigorated by a close attention to rich colors and dynamic forms. Lorette’s influence on Matisse’s change in artistic style exemplifies the reciprocal relationship between artist and subject.

Among the contemporary examples of portraiture included in the exhibition is Nicole Eisenman’s painting Groundsweller (2014). Recalling the formal geometric vocabulary of Russian Constructivism and Cubism, the central figure is winking and smoking a joint, a characteristic use of humor and tragicomic figuration typical of the artist’s practice. The figure itself has a certain “gender agnosticism,” a term utilized by Eisenman, allowing for an inclusive reading of the subject. Like other work in her oeuvre, Eisenman uses portraiture to explore the complexities of the human condition and social issues. In Groundsweller, the artist shows how the genre can be at once universally familiar and intimate.

Portraiture: From Cassatt to Warhol opens to the public January 21st, 2025, and will run through March 21st in the gallery’s New York location.

eisenman

NICOLE EISENMAN

Groundsweller, 2014

Oil on canvas

56 x 43 inches (142.2 x 109.2 cm)