Thousands of people visit Warhol's Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce each year. (source: SITA)
AN EXHIBITION of original works by Andy Warhol, scheduled to open August 6 at the Museum of Modern Art of Andy Warhol (MMUAW) in the eastern Slovak town of Medzilaborce, has been delayed indefinitely because of a failure in the air-conditioning system, the head of the museum, Valika Maďarová, informed the SITA newswire.
Warhol's parents came from the nearby village of Miková.
Organisers had planned the initial exhibition of 60 Warhol works gathered from private collections along with a showing of Daniel Brogyányi's Hommage Andy Warhol for the 80th birthday of the King of Pop Art.
The event was to have included a lecture and a gala opening party, attended by Warhol's nephew, Jeffrey Warhol, as well as a number of private collectors.
As Michal Bycko, the chairman of the Society of Andy Warhol and the Museum's curator, told the SITA newswire, the exhibition in Medzilaborce would have been the biggest exhibition of Warhol's works anywhere in the world outside Pittsburgh.
Visitors could have seen 60 works that the museum had borrowed from private collectors and 180 more that are part of the current exhibition at the museum. Of those, 31 belong to the state, while the rest come from private collections. The pieces have been lent to the Museum for unspecified periods of time.
Bycko stressed that Warhol's art is unique in the world, in monetary value as well as artistic merit.
In the past year, prices of Warhol's works have risen an average of 300 percent in art auctions around the world.
The air-conditioning troubles were apparently a by- product of a dispute between the curators, and the administrator and owner of the museum building, the Prešov Region.
A new date for the exhibition will be announced by the
Medzilaborce Museum as soon as it is known.
