Uncovering Warhol's Eastern European past—a landmark exhibit comes to Czechia

For the first time, the work of Andy Warhol—artist, publisher, filmmaker, and cultural provocateur—will be on display in Eastern Bohemia. From Feb. 24 through April 27, 2025, Pardubice’s Gočár Gallery will host The Lived Dream of Andy Warhol, an exhibition that situates Warhol’s work within the lesser-known contours of his life.

A collaboration between the Pardubice Region and Slovakia’s Prešov region, the show draws from the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce, a small institution located not far from the village of Miková, where Warhol’s parents were born.

Visitors will find a familiar Warhol here—serigraph portraits, commercial graphics, and silkscreened icons of American consumer culture—but also a less obvious one. Early pen-and-ink drawings will be exhibited alongside personal effects, including one of his jackets. There are rarities, too: Indian Head Nickel, Hans Christian Andersen, and other works that have never before been exhibited in the Czech Republic.

Warhol’s legacy is often reduced to a series of well-worn images—Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, his factory-floor aphorisms—but the reality was more complicated. Born Andrej Varchola, the son of Rusyn immigrants, he grew up speaking an East Slavic dialect at home and praying with his devout Catholic mother.

By the time he arrived in New York in 1949, he had already remade himself once, adopting an Americanized spelling of his name and working as a commercial illustrator before finding his way into the downtown art world. The duality of his identity—immigrant’s son turned celebrity, outsider turned ultimate insider—haunts much of his work.

“The famous Andy Warhol was also a deeply anxious, religious man,” says Martin Cubjak, director of the Warhol Museum in Medzilaborce. “He lived between extremes—hyper-visible yet withdrawn, wildly successful yet deeply insecure.” This tension—between Warhol the brand and Warhol the man—is central to the Pardubice exhibition.

Curator Michal Bycko sees the show as an opportunity to complicate the mythology. “People tend to forget that Warhol was born into a world far removed from New York’s art scene,” he says. “His roots in Eastern Europe shaped him more than many realize.”

The exhibition opened on Feb. 24 at the Gočár Gallery in Pardubice’s Automatické Mlýny complex will show more than 150 Warhol works. The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce, along with the Pittsburgh museum, is the only singular in the world that cares for the legacy of the brilliant artist.

Warhol was of Ruthenian descent, born in Pittsburgh as Andrew Warhola in 1928 to partents coming from the village of Mikova near Medzilaborce. The theme of death is often evident in Warhol's work, including in the presented portraits of Marilyn Monroe.

"Thematically, they belong to the American Death series. The aim was not to create Marilyn Monroe laughing, winking or crying. He multiplied the same motif in different color variations, creating a psychological effect," the museum head Martin Cubjak said.