Andy Warhol. Ladies and Gentlemen

Exhibitions

Ferrara is preparing to host an international event in spring 2026. It marks the 50th anniversary of the epoch-making Ladies and Gentlemen exhibition of 1975-76, which brought one of the most charismatic figures of the 20th century to Palazzo dei Diamanti: Andy Warhol

Ferrara celebrates the event by hosting the masterpieces of the father of pop art in the same venue. It will not only be an exhibition on Warhol, but a re-edition of the transgressive exhibition that Warhol himself presented in Italy and which marked a turning point in his production and in the art of the time. With Ladies and Gentlemen, the artist had, for the first time, chosen anonymous African-American and Puerto Rican drag queens as the protagonists of his work, as well as icons of show business such as Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor, on whom he had focused until then, shifting his attention to the individual and their identity. A new energy emerges from these vivid and exuberant portraits, giving life to a colourful gallery of glam-queer effigies that seem to herald the aesthetic trends of the third millennium.

The exhibition offers an exceptional selection of over 150 portraits, including acrylics, drawings, silkscreen prints and Polaroids, from important European and American museums and collections.

The dual ambition is to rediscover the iconic power of these explosive images and, at the same time, to test the surprising relevance of Warhol's research, which anticipated the era of global communication and turned the spotlight on issues that are still open today, such as aesthetic manipulation, gender identity, multiculturalism, media artificiality, and the creation and spread of social identity.