Celebrity Portraits from the Warhol Factory Years:
Billy Name, Gerard Malanga, Carl Fischer, and Curtis Knapp
Saturday, February 18 - Friday, March 31, 2006

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to present Celebrity Portraits from the Warhol Factory Years: Billy Name, Gerard Malanga, Carl Fischer, and Curtis Knapp, which opens to the public on Saturday, February 18 and runs through Friday, March 31. This is an exclusive exhibition, which includes many photographs never before exhibited.

This exhibition brings together for the first time over 30 iconic portraits by four prominent photographers who were on the scene during the decades that came to define the Andy Warhol Factory years (1960s-80s). The photographs span two decades, from the earliest years in the "Silver Factory" through the 1980s. The exhibition includes portraits that have never been exhibited before, and many are from scarce and very limited editions.

Above, left to right: Billy Name, "Edie Sedgwick, Screen Test"; Gerard Malanga, "Nico Screen Test";
Carl Fischer, "Andy Warhol on TV"; Curtis Knapp, "Andy Warhol in the Factory, 1980s."
All images copyright by the artists.

Photographs in the exhibition include portraits of Edie Sedgwick, Nico, International Velvet (Susan Bottomly), Jasper Johns, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Gerard Malanga, Alan Ginsberg, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol's mother, as well as several portraits of Andy himself, both formal portraits and images of the artist at work, at play and in casual settings.

View artists' images: Billy Name | Gerard Malanga | Carl Fischer | Curtis Knapp

About the Artists

Billy Name is known as the main archivist of the Factory era from 1964-70, and the creator of the look and design of Warhol's "Silver Factory." His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications, including, most recently, a Retrospective of his photography at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, in 1997, and the book, All Tomorrow's Parties: Billy Name's Photographs of Andy Warhol's Factory (1997). Name has a photo archive collection of around 3,000 images from the Warhol era and the art and music scene through the present day.

Gerard Malanga, photographer, filmmaker, poet, archivist, and artist, worked closely with Andy Warhol in the 1960s, and began working at the Factory as Warhol's silkscreen assistant in 1963 and helped produce Warhol's first silkscreen paintings. He soon began collaborating with Warhol on the famous "Screen Tests" series shot in the Factory and worked on many of Warhol's underground films. His work has appeared in many exhibitions, and most recently during the Vienna "Viennale" in 2005 at the Charim Galerie. Malanga has written twenty-three books and numerous articles, and his most recent publications include No Respect: New and Selected Poems 1964-2000 (2001) and a major book of his photographs, Gerard Malanga: Screen Tests, Portraits, Nudes 1964-1996 (2003).

Carl Fischer graduated from The Cooper Union and studied in London at the Saint Martins College of Art and Design on a Fulbright Fellowship. He then began his career as an advertising art director in New York, and in the 1950's he opened a photography studio in New York and produced work that has won numerous awards, including, most recently, two works in the top 10 "Best 40 Magazine Covers" awarded by The American Society of Magazine Editors. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The International Center of Photography, The George Eastman House, and The Rose Art Museum. His book of photography, Portraits: 1953 to 1984, was published in 2006.

Curtis Knapp is an award-winning portrait and fashion photographer. He attended the Parsons School of Design, New York. Since the 1980s, he has photographed some of the greatest artists, musicians, actors, writers, and celebrities of our day, including Madonna (her first portrait magazine cover), Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, REM, Brian Eno, Dennis Hopper, Margaux Hemmingway, John Hurt, and many others. In 1982, he began shooting for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine, and met Warhol in 1983, the year he shot the portraits in our exhibition. Knapp has published seven books of photography, including Catwalk: Fashion Models of Japan (1993), Foto Portraits (1998), Prison's Inside Art (1999), and a series of nudes shot in Japan. His portraits of Andy Warhol are among the last images we have of Warhol in his last Factory.

Museum Exhibition and Artist Updates

The photographs in the original exhibition at Irvine Contemporary are now part of the Martin Sanders collection. Martin Sanders has sponsored museum exhibitions of the photographs as originally curated by Martin Irvine at the Ludwig Museum - Koblenz  (August-October, 2007) (museum info; Irvine info), and at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (July-September, 2009) (museum info).

A catalog for Celebrity Portraits from the Andy Warhol Factory Years: The Martin Sanders Collection, Photographs by Billy Name, Curtis Knapp, Gerard Malanga & Carl Fischer, with an essay by Martin Irvine, was published by the Ludwig Museum and is available through Irvine Contemporary. (Info.) Link to catalog essay by Martin Irvine (pdf).

Curtis Knapp's photographs of Andy Warhol ("red canvas") were also published in the catalog for Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Work of Andy Warhol, Gagosian Gallery, 2006.

Catalogue Published for the Ludwig Museum Exhibition
Celebrity Portraits from the Andy Warhol Factory Years: The Martin Sanders Collection, Photographs by Billy Name, Curtis Knapp, Gerard Malanga & Carl Fischer
August 26 – October 28, 2007

Catalogue contains 34 color and black and white photographs. Published by the Ludwig Museum. Photographs originally from the exhibition at Irvine Contemporary, 2006. Essay by Dr. Martin Irvine, Director, Irvine Contemporary. Cover photograph by Carl Fischer and copyright by the artist.

Catalogue available through the gallery: $25 (plus mailing). Phone and email orders accepted.