The Andy Warhol Museum announces photography exhibition, “Jeremy Kost: Friends with Benefits”

PITTSBURGH, PA.- The Andy Warhol Museum announces a photography exhibition, Jeremy Kost: Friends with Benefits, opened December 2, 2012.

Jeremy Kost is a tireless chronicler of gender, sexuality, and nightlife. Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, he now lives and works in New York City, though he regularly travels the world to capture images, whether they’re of male models in the Californian desert or drag queens strutting through Pittsburgh. Strongly influenced by Warhol, both in his choice of subjects and technique, Kost extends the creative potential of one of Warhol’s favorite tools – the Polaroid camera. In Kost’s work, Polaroid images not only form the basis of silkscreen paintings but are massed together in elaborate, multilayered photo-collages.

Jeremy Kost, The Wicked Witch of the West, 2012, Courtesy Jeremy Kost Studio

In May 2012 The Warhol partnered with Hugo Boss to present a solo exhibition, Of an Instance, featuring Kost’s work in New York City. Friends with Benefits, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, which opens at The Warhol on December 2, 2012, builds upon the New York exhibition by focusing on works depicting an intimate family of renowned Pittsburgh-based drag performers. The exhibition features new work produced especially for The Warhol, including a monumental photo-collage executed on the site of Andy Warhol’s grave.

Kost states, “As an artist in today’s world, it is impossible to escape the reach of Andy Warhol’s immense influence. For me personally, it lies more in his thinking, appreciation for things of beauty, and the way that we collectively perceive the world. We clearly share common subjects, both literally and generationally. Also sharing similar mediums and processes, it has always been important for me to add to the discourse of his legacy without being derivative, and I aspire to do that always.”

Nicholas Chambers, Milton Fine curator of art states, “Kost brings a unique technique and sensibility to Polaroid photography that marries its spontaneity with labor-intensive studio processes. He completely pulls apart the notion of the ‘instant’, embodied by the snap-shot, and reconstructs it as something far more complex and inherently unstable. His beguiling images point to the layered nature of identity and place.”