Andy Warhol for the Tenth Anniversary of the Skyscraper

To mark the tenth anniversary of the Skyscraper, Intesa Sanpaolo presents a masterpiece from the Group's art collections, Andy Warhol's legendary Triple Elvis, to the public in Turin for the very first time.

Taken from the Luigi and Peppino Agrati Collection, an encyclopaedic collection of contemporary art built up between the 1960s and the 1980s, the work was brought, thanks to the legacy of Cavalier Luigi Agrati, under the historical-artistic heritage protected and exhibited by Intesa Sanpaolo.

It is one of the works from the “Elvis” series exhibited by Andy Warhol in Andy Warhol: Elvis Paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963.

Dedicated to Elvis Presley, in a sort of repeatable and original event, it celebrated  the man who was about to become the extraordinary protagonist of the international art scene.

The exhibition was dedicated entirely to Elvis, who was portrayed in all 22 works, enlarged and multiplied in the same frame, taken from a publicity image from the 1960 film Flaming Star. The uniqueness of the exhibition and its originality lay in the fact that the artist was experimenting at that time with a striking silver background for his works and that he was working for the first time on the repetition of the same subject on the same canvas.

This resulted in an extremely rare series, which immediately became sought-after and displayed in museums, joining the firmament of works celebrating the great celebrities that became eternal and emblematic of Andy Warhol's work.

In this case, Elvis emerges, seemingly suspended against a timeless, almost futuristic background of metallic silver, the same used by the artist to paint his entire Factory, even creating floating clouds with inflatable cushions. Unlike other colours, silver is timeless, devoid of any natural reference, and made precious by a kind of lapidary placement in space and light.

The Triple Elvis displayed here has a significant and important history: it was part of the great exhibition Andy Warhol: Elvis Paintings, after almost immediately entering the Collection of Leo Castelli, the acclaimed art dealer and deus ex machina promoter of post-World War II American art, was purchased by Peppino Agrati in 1971.

The year after its first exhibition, Triple Elvis already represented the emblem of this series of works dedicated to Elvis in publications and anthological exhibitions, including major shows at the Tate Gallery in London (1971) and the Whitney Museum in New York (1984).