Keys to Understanding the Dia Collection
From this context, the class examines a decisive shift: the move from representation toward practices in which experience, time, and space take on a structural role. How does the idea of the artwork change when it no longer resides solely in its immediate materiality? What role does the viewer occupy when perception becomes a constitutive part of the work itself? These are some of the questions that emerge throughout the virtual tour of the galleries.
The class is organized around artists such as James Turrell, Andy Warhol, and Agnes Martin, focusing on the specific operations each one develops in their work: light as matter and perceptual construction, repetition and seriality as forms of production, formal reduction as a field of sensory intensity. Within this framework, concepts such as scale, duration, environment, and materiality are explored as elements that define the very experience of the artwork.
The class offers tools to situate these productions within their historical context while also opening up a close reading of their dialogue within the exhibition.
Andy Warhol: Image, Repetition, and Mass Culture
● Thursday, May 14, 2026
As part of the exhibition “Penumbra: Dia Art Foundation,” this new online class is dedicated to Andy Warhol, a central figure in twentieth-century art. The session offers an approach to his work through the series Shadows (1978), a monumental piece conceived as a single painting in multiple parts (more than one hundred), which places abstraction and representation in tension through repetition, chromatic variation, and spatial experience.
Throughout the class, we will trace his production from his beginnings in graphic design and his arrival in New York to his consolidation as a leading figure of Pop Art. Warhol transformed the relationship between art, consumer culture, and mass media through the use of images drawn from the media world and reproduced through techniques such as silkscreen printing. His interventions — based on color, repetition, and minimal gestures — gave rise to a distinctive visual language, while his own public persona became part of the work itself.
The class is designed for those interested in exploring Warhol’s universe from an accessible and reflective perspective. An opportunity to examine how his artistic practice exceeded the traditional boundaries of art, bringing together image, identity, and visual culture within a single strategy.
Agnes Martin: Between Minimalism and Spirituality
Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912, and based between New York and the desert of New Mexico, Martin developed a pictorial practice centered on repetition, line, and color as means of reaching states of attention and stillness. Her work is built through rigorous structures — pencil-drawn grids and modulated surfaces — sustained by an aesthetic search linked to spirituality. In dialogue with Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, her practice moves toward an inner dimension informed by Zen Buddhism and American transcendentalist thought.
The session approaches her work as an experience that connects perception and contemplation, demanding from the viewer a space of conscious attention. Throughout the class, we will examine her trajectory and her singular position within the artistic movements of her time, focusing on the tensions between structure and sensitivity that run through her work. Martin’s surfaces, constructed through minimal gestures and subtle variations, move away from the idea of a rigid system to give way to a practice grounded in precision and the intensity of the line.
The class will also explore her relationship with landscape, particularly her experience in the desert of New Mexico, where she developed much of her production. There, her work became closely tied to states of consciousness and to an inner dimension that traverses her entire practice.