To celebrate this historic event, the city plays host to the masterworks of the father of Pop Art. More than a simple restaging of that legendary exhibition, this is an opportunity to discover a selection of his most celebrated portraits and self-portraits. The Ladies and Gentlemen series helped redefine portraiture for the contemporary age. After exploring the myths of the entertainment world and immortalising iconic figures, Warhol presented the world premiere of a cycle dedicated to anonymous Black and Latina drag queens. Turning for the first time to marginalised subjects, he focused his attention on the individual, their identity and their representation.

The exhibition Andy Warhol. Ladies and Gentlemen, conceived and organised by the Fondazione Ferrara Arte and by the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Ferrara, and supported by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, presents an exceptional selection of over 150 portraits – acrylics, drawings, silkscreen prints and Polaroids – from major museums and collections, offering an immersive restaging of the 1975-76 exhibition alongside a journey through Warhol’s world of portraiture.

The ambition is twofold: to rediscover the iconic power of those compelling images and, at the same time, to reveal the surprising relevance of Warhol’s work – which anticipated the era of global communication and brought into focus issues that remain wide open today, such as aesthetic manipulation, gender identity, multiculturalism, artificiality and media overexposure.

The Ladies and Gentlemen section is followed by a selection of some of Warhol’s most iconic portraits and self-portraits from between the 1960s and 1980s: from the Marilyn series, which codified the archetype of the star, to the playful parody of Mao Tse-Tung’s official iconography, to the silhouettes of Mick Jagger and Liza Minnelli, global emblems of ambiguous, theatrical sensuality; the fluid, dematerialised portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe and Grace Jones, which anticipate the advent of digital images, and, finally, an arresting room of self-portraits through which the artist explored the boundaries of his own identity.

The exhibition traces the stages of Warhol’s radical reinvention of the traditional portrait, drawing on the codes of mass communication, the technological aesthetic, the idioms of glam rock and camp culture, amateur photographs shot with a Polaroid, the language of film and even reality television. Visitors will be invited to immerse themselves in the creative process of Warhol’s genius through an extensive body of acrylic paintings, many of which never before seen in Italy, and a survey of the different media the artist explored. Film footage and photographs further enrich the narrative, bringing the artist back to life in the galleries of Palazzo dei Diamanti and evoking the singular vitality of the Pop scene that Warhol came to embody.