ART GALLERY

Photograph by Hiroyasu Sakaguchi
©2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,Inc./ARS,N.Y./JASPAR,Tokyo E0434

Kimiko Powers: Portraits, such as his Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie (Jacqueline Kennedy), Mao (Mao Zedong) and his Self Portrait have consistently held an important position in Warhol’s work. In the 1970s, Warhol gradually moved from ubiquitous images of well-known figures, such as film stars, statesmen, artists, or gangsters who were immediately recognizable to the public from mass media, to portraits of his friends and socially prominent people, and eventually to regular commissioned portraits based on Polaroid photos. Among these, Kimiko Powers, the beautiful portrait of Kimiko Powers in kimono, marked an important turning point. It was exhibited in the 1972 Corpus Christi, Texas, group exhibition, “Johns, Stella, Warhol: Works in Series”, as part of Warhol’s installation of 25 portraits arranged in a huge 5-meter square grid. When the exhibition was dismantled, 9 of the portraits were reconfigured into a 3-meter square grid, and the others went to friends of John and Kimiko Powers and their family. In the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol produced three additional series of portraits of Kimiko Powers.