PITTSBURGH, PA.- The Andy Warhol Museum announces Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body. The exhibition is the first comprehensive look at Andy Warhol’s engagement with the body, highlighting The Warhol’s permanent collection and including rarely traveled loans from the collections of major American museums. The Warhol’s Associate Curator of Art Jessica Beck curated the exhibition.

Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body reveals the parallels between Warhol’s personal history, including his struggles with his own physical appearance—such as early signs of balding in the 1950s to scars following his 1968 shooting—and the treatment of the body as a subject in his work, from student drawings of the 1940s to late paintings of the 1980s.

“This exhibition reveals how the body in Warhol’s work becomes a subject for trauma, torment, shame, desire, transformation, and manipulation,” says Beck. “It is meant to establish a different narrative and introduce a new approach to understanding Warhol’s practice, tracing how his personal afflictions manifested in the work and, more broadly, how this torment fueled his working method. The exhibition asserts that Warhol’s engagement with Pop started with the body.”

More than 200 artworks, including paintings, drawings, photographs, films, source material, and archival objects explore exhibition themes: the tormented body, the body abstracted, the interior and exterior, and the sculpted body. Many of the works on view were never shown during Warhol’s lifetime.

In 1961 Warhol used advertisements as source material to create a series of handpainted works focused on physical flaws and the means to correct them. One of the earliest examples of this theme is Before and After (1961–62), a painting of a facial plastic surgery ad that Warhol painted in four versions with varying styles; two of the versions from this series are on view.

Following this early period, trauma emerges in the Disaster (1963–64) paintings, abstraction and a metaphysical trace of the body exist in the Oxidations (1978) and Rorschachs (1984), and transformation and humanity are explored in The Last Supper (1986), in black light, where Christ and a bodybuilder are aligned side-byside.

Many of the artworks on view display the body in pieces, cropping it to show only sections at a time—torsos, feet, hands—which can be seen in such works as the film Sleep (1963), 1950s Boy Book drawings, and Torsos Posterior View (1977). The 1960s medical diagrams and advertisements promising physical perfection surface again in the 1980s when Warhol returned to the theme with drawings of corsets, dentures, and cosmetic surgery, as well as physiological diagrams where the interior of the body is put on display. Warhol famously said in a 1966 interview, “Pop is just taking the outside and putting it on the inside or taking the inside and putting it on the outside.”