“El coleccionista de cabezas o las grandes ocasiones de Andy Warhol” de Reinaldo Laddaga

The book El coleccionista de cabezas o las grandes ocasiones de Andy Warhol de Reinaldo Laddaga, published by Jekyll & Jill, offers us a review of everything we think we know about an artist as famous as Andy Warhol. We recall his acid-colored paintings of Marilyn Monroe and his multiplied Campbell’s Soup cans, but vast areas of his work remain unexplored and secret. We know almost nothing about the skeletal drawings of the young provincial advertising designer who aspired to the painter’s prestige, the multi-media spectacles where his narcotic stars danced, the paparazzi-style photographs and graffiti-covered portraits of 1970s celebrities, the grand occasions when he stormed this or that museum to display his own or other people’s collections, the disconcerting comedy of the books and reports, the sparse diaries, and the boxes filled with heterogeneous objects he called “time capsules.”

Reinaldo Laddaga sets out to correct this omission, recover the forgotten regions of this protean oeuvre, and imagine a more exuberant, more lively, more inventive, and more contemporary Andy Warhol than the figure art history presents us with.

At Es Baluard Museu, we regularly schedule and promote book and publication presentations with the aim of directly appealing to reflection on various issues affecting contemporary art, artistic practices, and, by extension, our time. In each edition, we invite the authors of the texts to share their theses with us, along with other critics, writers, and other professionals in the field.

Presented by: Marcos Augusto, writer

Reinaldo Laddaga (Rosario, Argentina, 1963) has lived in the United States for years. He has taught at various universities in that country and Latin America and is the author of a dozen books of criticism and fiction. Among them are Atlas del Eclipse, the phantasmagorical account of his walks through New York during the pandemic (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022); Los hombres de Rusia, una novela (Jekyll & Jill, 2019); Un prólogo a los libros de mi padre, una memoria (Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2011); and two volumes of essays on contemporary art and literature: Estética de laboratorio (Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2010) and Estética de la emergencia (Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2006).