2112 is pleased to present Creating an Icon: Andy Warhol through the Lens of David McCabe, an exhibition presenting a focused selection of photographs taken by David McCabe during the year he was commissioned by Andy Warhol to document his daily life. Produced between 1964 and 1965, these images capture Warhol at a formative moment —a period in which his artistic practice, social environment, and public identity were rapidly evolving.
The exhibition traces Warhol’s movements across the cultural geography of mid- 1960s New York: the silverlined interiors of the Factory; the rooftop of McCabe’s own studio overlooking the Empire State Building; fashion shoots that dissolved into spontaneous tableaux; late-night clubs, private apartments, and other semipublic sites where art, music, fashion, and celebrity converged.
Several photographs feature the individuals who shaped Warhol’s expanding world. Edie Sedgwick, his most luminous early muse, appears in images ranging from rooftop portraits to scenes shot at the Scene nightclub, where early video technology reconfigured her and Warhol’s reflections into uncanny distortions. Marisol, the celebrated sculptor whose own exhibition is currently on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, is portrayed with Warhol in quietly introspective compositions that counter the era’s otherwise performative atmosphere.
The broader cultural constellation of the time is reflected in images of Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, and Rudolf Nureyev, whose presence underscores the fluid intersection between the visual and performing arts. An especially revealing sequence depicts Robert Rauschenberg and Warhol absorbed in a game of Monopoly—a moment that gestures toward both camaraderie and the subtle professional rivalry between two of the most influential artists of the postwar period.
McCabe’s access extended into the heart of the Factory, where he documented Warhol and Gerard Malanga producing the Flower paintings: mixing pigments, transferring acetate, masking canvases, and navigating the shifting dynamic of work, play, and spectacle as figures such as Sedgwick, Chuck Wein, and Billy Name circulate through the periphery. These images illuminate the processes and interpersonal rhythms that animated Warhol’s early studio environment.
Creating an Icon: Andy Warhol through the Lens of David McCabe offers a rare view into the emergence of a cultural figure whose public image would soon become inseparable from his artistic legacy. McCabe’s work makes visible the early mechanisms of self-invention that shaped Warhol’s trajectory—and, in turn, the visual language of contemporary art itself.
The exhibition is curated by Susan Cipolla, wife of David McCabe and custodian of his photographic legacy at CIPOLLA GALLERY.
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