October 21 2025 -> January 25 2026

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
T : +34 917 911 370
Paseo del Prado 8
28014 Madrid
Spain

Contact

T : +34 917 911 370
cavthyssen@museothyssen.org
https://www.museothyssen.org

Andy Warhol’s fascination with Jackson Pollock is well documented, from his obsession with owning a Pollock in his extensive art collection to the connection between his famous Death and Disaster series and the tragic car accident that claimed Pollock’s life one night in August 1956. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents an exhibition bringing together the works of these two pivotal figures in 20th-century art, alongside other artists of the period who explored new approaches to space. Though seemingly very different, Pollock and Warhol share, like an entire generation of artists, a concern with shifts in pictorial tradition, spatial experimentation, and a fascination with large-scale formats.

Seeing these works together allows us to appreciate that Pollock was not always simply an “abstract master,” nor was Warhol merely an artist preoccupied with banal, mass-produced subjects rendered dispassionately. Straddling the boundary between abstraction and figuration, each artist in their own way revisited the concept of space, using it as a site of concealment and layering. Both challenged traditional notions of figure and ground and pursued a pictorial strategy that functioned, in part, as camouflage. In both cases, their work was partially autobiographical, exploring repetition, seriality, and abstraction as methods for revealing new ways of seeing the world they inhabited.