At Skarstedt, Andy Warhol’s Historical Remix

Warhol’s Head (After Picasso) N” 12 1985. Photo by Lisa Freeman.

In a city where gallery hopping often feels like scrolling through an endless Instagram feed, Skarstedt's latest exhibition cuts through the noise with something refreshingly meta. "Andy Warhol: Who is Who?" — fresh off a successful Paris run and now installed in their Upper East Side space — offers a rare glimpse into the pop art icon's complex relationship with art history's heavyweights.

The exhibition, which runs through the end of March, is anything but another showcase of Warhol's greatest hits. In fact, it’s more of a cover-album that focuses on his late-career appropriations of art’s historical touchstones. These works from the 1970s and 80s reveal an artist simultaneously wrestling with and reveling in his place within the grand artistic pantheon. The show features essential selections from series including "Heads (After Picasso)," "The Last Supper," "Four Mona Lisas," "After de Chirico," and "Details of Renaissance Paintings" — a collection that maps Warhol's fascination with icons both sacred and profane.

“I prefer to remain a mystery; I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all different every time I’m asked…I’m influenced by other painters, everyone is art,” Warhol said in a quote that is appropriately emblazoned on the wall of the gallery, which is located just blocks from the UES home the pop art progenitor shared with his mom.

What emerges from “Who is Who?" isn't just another Warhol retrospective but a sophisticated interrogation of how the Factory maestro positioned himself within art's lineage. As Italian critic Germano Celant observed, "the history of art is itself a concrete mirage, with its stars and superstars of every age, and Warhol absorbed this too in the magma of his imagination...he turned [these artists] into dead flowers, so that the absolute subjectivity of art became once again a problem of media communication."

"Four Mona Lisas" (1978). Photo by Lisa Freeman.

The exhibition's centerpiece conversation happens between multiple iterations of "The Last Supper" and "Four Mona Lisas" (1978), creating a visual dialogue that illuminates Warhol's late-career obsessions. The "Four Mona Lisas" works, which Warhol first approached in 1963 following the painting's blockbuster Metropolitan Museum appearance, get a more painterly treatment in their 1970s incarnation. Their deep blacks and browns foreshadow the "Reversals" series that would emerge later.

Meanwhile, the multiple "Last Supper" variations offer the most direct acknowledgment of Warhol's Catholic upbringing — a biographical detail that has only recently gained scholarly attention. The hand-drawn example reveals a surprisingly vulnerable Warhol, one whose religious contemplations feel almost confessional amid the AIDS crisis and societal chaos of the 1980s. In stark contrast, the double silkscreened versions and "Detail of the Last Supper / Be a Somebody with a Body" (1985-1986) blend religious iconography with Warhol's career-long preoccupation with celebrity, beauty, and mortality.

A detail from Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" (top) and Warhol’s “Detail of Renaissance Painting (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482). Photo by Lisa Freeman

The exhibition's curatorial brilliance extends to Warhol's engagement with Renaissance masterpieces, including cropped iterations of da Vinci's "Annunciation" and Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" (both 1984). By isolating Venus's face, Warhol creates an uncanny parallel with his iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, collapsing centuries of beauty standards into a single visual continuum. The "Annunciation" works similarly, subverting its religious origins by emphasizing landscape over spiritual narrative.

Even Giorgio de Chirico gets the Warhol treatment in "The Two Sisters (After de Chirico)" and "The Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico)" (both 1982). These works, created after de Chirico's controversial MoMA retrospective that same year, show Warhol nodding to a kindred spirit in artistic repetition — a practice MoMA notably sidelined in de Chirico's show.

Perhaps most haunting are the "Head (After Picasso)" works from 1985, which appropriate Picasso's skeletal drawings from the 1960s. Rendered against black backgrounds, these floating, spectral faces seem to emerge from darkness, embodying both artists' confrontations with mortality.

By embedding himself within art history's narrative through these appropriations, Warhol simultaneously elevated his source material and himself. In the process, he created a body of work that continues to collapse distinctions between high and low, sacred and profane, original and copy — distinctions that feel increasingly irrelevant in our endlessly reproducible digital present.

"Andy Warhol: Who is Who?" runs through March 29 at Skarstedt, 20 E. 79th St., New York City.