Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstrasse 35a, Munich (Germany)
The last Liquid Rhythm evening at Museum Brandhorst fell three days before Party of Life closed — January 23, 2025. By that point the exhibition had been running long enough for everyone who kept meaning to go to have finally gone, which meant the museum was full of people who had been putting it off. The DJ console was positioned in the main room of the exhibition, surrounded by Warhol’s Art Car and Keith Haring paintings. Drinks were being served at the entrance bar. The atmosphere was convivial rather than club-like — conversations, the music underneath them, people drifting between the main room and the quieter galleries beyond.
Hosting a DJ evening inside a Warhol exhibition is not a gimmick. The Factory was not a studio that occasionally threw parties. It was both simultaneously, and you could not really separate them. Running Liquid Rhythm through the exhibition’s final weeks was the most honest thing the museum could have done with the material.
Party of Life was the world’s first comprehensive exhibition pairing Warhol with Keith Haring — the younger artist he mentored and befriended in the New York of the 1980s. The case for pairing them was straightforward. Despite the thirty-year age gap, both came from Christian families in Pennsylvania. Both found their world in New York as gay men. Both were committed, without irony or apology, to making art that reached as many people as possible — Haring through subway drawings and activist posters, Warhol through the radical democratisation of the image. Museum Brandhorst, which holds the largest Warhol collection outside the United States, was where it made sense to show it.
The Art Car in the main room anchored the evening — Haring paintings on the walls around it, the DJ playing above the general noise. People who wanted to look at the work moved into the other rooms. People who wanted to talk stayed. It was comfortable in the way that good events are, where nobody is performing enjoyment.
In one of the quieter rooms I found the Campbell’s Soup dress — a mini dress bearing Warhol’s 1966 design. The pop image transferred to something wearable, the boundary between art object and consumer product made literal and then made strange. The contrast with the animated main room sharpened it.
The exhibition drew 190,000 visitors. Walking through it on a Tuesday evening in January, with a DJ playing in the room where Warhol’s car sat, it was easy to understand why people kept coming.
Artène covered Andy Warhol & Keith Haring : Party of Life during the last Liquid Rhythm event, 23 January 2025. All photography by Elasse.