Aspen Art Museum to close for six weeks before Warhol show

The Aspen Art Museum will be closed from Oct. 18 through Dec. 2 in preparation for its museum-wide survey “Andy Warhol: Lifetimes.”

The Warhol show, filling every gallery and exhibition space in the museum, is set to open Dec. 3 and run through March 27. The museum released new details about the show Thursday while announcing the extended closure.

The six-week closure is “in order to accommodate the exhibition’s installation and improve amenities,” the announcement reads.

The show, organized by Tate Modern and Museum Ludwig, Cologne in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Aspen Art Museum, will include more than 200 of Warhol’s works. It will take over the entire museum, which has only happened once for a single show since the new building opened in 2014 (that was a collaboration between artists Wade Guyton, David Weiss and Peter Fischli in 2017).

The museum’s presentation will be structured to examine Warhol’s life in parallel with his work, presenting them side by side to expand the public’s understanding of Warhol through biographical archival materials.

Artist Monica Majoli is working with the museum to re-conceptualize the staging of the exhibition from its previous iterations at Tate Modern and elsewhere.

“The Aspen Art Museum is delighted to present this intimate portrayal of Andy Warhol, which peers into the spectral persona that the artist created so he could transcend his personal limitations, generating a cultural myth, mirror and decoder that has enchanted the modern world for decades,” museum director Nicola Lees said in the initial announcement. “By presenting his canonical works alongside archival and direct source materials, the exhibition will give viewers an unprecedented opportunity to examine Warhol’s life and work in the context of one another, ultimately establishing a new appreciation for this visionary artist of incomparable importance.”

Thursday’s announcement detailed six themes within the massive exhibition, which will take over corridors as well as all galleries.

The highlighted gallery themes include “After and Before,” a biographical exhibition showcasing archival materials alongside Warhols works depicting Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Campbell Soup Cans and his “Flowers” series. “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” will use “immersive multichannel projections” to recreate the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” live events Warhol produced between 1966 and 1967 that includes the music of the Velvet Underground and Nico and performances by Edie Sedgwick, Gerald Malanga and Barbara Rubin.