The Lost Warhols – an exhibition of works portraying iconic artist Andy Warhol. 

Ad Lib Gallery is presenting The Lost Warhols, an exclusive exhibition of works portraying the iconic artist Andy Warhol. The exhibition will run between the 18th May until 18th June 2023.

The exhibition is curated by American photographer and street artist Karen Bystedt. It features new interpretations of her archival photographs of Warhol, by a selection of international contemporary artists including MAXIM, James Mylne, Peter Tunney, and Miguel Paredes.

In 1983, Bystedt, a tenacious young film student at NYU, cold-called Warhol at Interview Magazine. She invited him to pose for her for her “book-in-progress” which featured the era’s top male models.

She had come across an image of the artist modelling for Barney’s. She was hoping to capture the icon in a unique context positioned amongst faces renowned for their aesthetic ideal. When Warhol understood who she intended to include, he swiftly agreed to join the fold.

Bystedt’s images capture a soft and vulnerable Warhol. Warhol, a man made infamous by iconifying famous people, was now the subject himself.

Bystedt included two of the thirty-six photos shot that afternoon in her book Not Just Another Pretty
Face published by Nal, and placed the negatives in storage, where they lived untouched for 25 years.

After all that time, she was compelled to unearth the images captured that afternoon. In doing so, Bystedt was able to locate 10 of her original negatives of Andy Warhol. Having turned from photographer to visionary pioneer in the mixed media form, Bystedt conceptualized a new future for her portraits, one that echoed her subject’s inventive spirit, and mirrored his approach to both inspiration and practice.

Giving form to a modern, immaterial Factory of her own, Bystedt then invited contemporary artists to interpret her images in their own artistic language. By doing so they could conceptualise a series of collaborations that would represent community and pay homage to the mixed media form so inextricably associated with the legacy of Warhol.

Exhibiting artists include, among others: Karen Bystedt (Miami); Brayden Bugazzi (LA); Consumer Art (New York); Cavanagh Foyle (Ireland); Carlos Manuel (Cuba); MAXIM (Czech Republic); Nick Munier (Ireland); James Mylne (London); Miguel Paredes (Miami) Will St Leger (Ireland); Louisa Tebbutt (London); and Peter Tunney (New York).

One of the first woman street artists to proliferate a male-dominated space, Karen Bystedt’s works have been collected by internationally renowned private and public collectors and have been exhibited next to Retna, Cleon Peterson, Big Sleeps, Bradley Theodore, Gregory Siff, Add Fuel, Producer BDB and Speedy Graffito. Karen Bystedt’s photographs of Andy Warhol have transcended from portraits taken by her as an NYU student to the concluding image in Blake Gopnik’s definitive biopic, WARHOL (Harper Collins 2020).

Bystedt photographed and immortalized such icons as Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves and Djimon Hounsou in her book ‘Before They Were Famous’ well before creating a massive contemporary archive re-identifying Warhols artworks with her own contributions to the street art world, opening the conversation of women breaking barriers in art, hip hop and pop culture today.