A Rare Andy Warhol Exhibit is Now on View at Calvin Klein’s Headquarters

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Normally upon entering the headquarters of a big fashion house, one expects to see a corporate (if stylish) environment: a security guard, a reception desk and, maybe, one or a few selected centerpieces on the wall. When it comes to Calvin Klein’s headquarters on 205 W.39th Street in New York’s Midtown district, that’s not the case–at least not this fall.

In a reconstructed space on the ground level of the brand’s headquarters’, a gallery has been built to display Shadows, a series of monumental abstract paintings by Andy Warhol in a rare look at one of the artist’s most unusual and unexpected bodies of work.

The exhibition is part of Calvin Klein’s longstanding tradition of integrating art with fashion. Starting in the mid ’90s, the brand has supported artists including Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and have, more recently, been working alongside the Andy Warhol Foundation to conserve and display Warhol’s works to a contemporary audience (including Raf Simon’s nod to the artist in the Pre-Fall’18 collection).

“Warhol’s work has always struck me as courageous,” Simons said, adding that even though it was not, “meant to conform to the expected, it still managed to be successful and commercial.” And that Warhol’s work was, “undeniably [a] changing force in contemporary art.”

The exhibition, co-hosted and curated by the Dia Art Foundation, consists of a single painting divided into multiple parts, which has not been on view in New York in over 20 years. “They’re installed in a very specific way, canvas to canvas, it’s a very unusual way to install a work,” Jessica Morgan, Director of the Dia Art Foundation, said at the opening, “We were incredibly pleased to encounter [Calvin Klein’s] space, a very industrial one.”

Shadows also serves as a tribute to Warhol’s craftsmanship as a painter: “I’m hoping this show will do a lot to re-stage Warhol’s interest in painting,” Courtney J. Martin, Chief Curator at the Dia Art Foundation, said. “I think he was a very serious painter, [who understood] the rules you can engage in [as well as] the rules you can break.”

“Shadows,” which opens to the public today and will run through December 15, is shown in concurrence with the Warhol retrospective (Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again) at the Whitney Museum of American Art–in what is set to be the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s works in almost 30 years.

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