The Monaco Masters Show, American 80s: from Warhol to Basquiat

Opera Gallery Monaco

03 July - 03 October 2026

Opera Gallery is delighted to present this year’s edition of The Monaco Masters Show, under the High Patronage of His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco. ‘American 80s: from Warhol to Basquiat’, an exhibition in support of Mission Enfance, brings into focus a decade in which artistic production became inseparable from the cultural, economic and social transformations of its time. If the 1960s marked the rise of Pop Art, the 1980s amplified its legacy into a more accelerated, hybrid and self-aware visual language—one shaped as much by mass media and the economy as by street art, the studio and legendary clubs of the era such as Studio 54.

Andy, Marilyn and the Factory

At the centre stands Andy Warhol, whose presence operates less as a singular influence than as a framework for what followed. Through the Factory and the blurred boundary it established between art, celebrity and commerce, Warhol created a framework within which a new generation of art could emerge. His Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn), 1967, remains emblematic of this shift: an image that is at once reproduction and icon, surface and mythology, encapsulating the mechanisms of visibility that would define the decade.

Basquiat: a voice of personal identity and collective memory

Around him, an artistic energy took hold—urgent and often deliberately unstable. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Pestus), 1982, exemplifies this condition. Executed during a pivotal year in his career, the work condenses the layered visual syntax through which Basquiat navigated questions of identity, history and power. Its immediacy and density speak to a moment in which painting reasserted itself as a site of both personal expression and socio-political critique.

Haring: from subway to galleries

Similarly rooted in the urban fabric yet radically accessible in form, Keith Haring’s Untitled, September 28, 1984, captures the graphic clarity and kinetic energy that made his work omnipresent in 1980s New York. Translating the visual language of the subway into the gallery, Haring forged an art that was at once popular and critical, playful and incisive.

The exhibition also situates these developments within a broader art-historical context. John Chamberlain’s Running Cathead, 1988, extends the Pop interrogation of gesture and authorship into sculptural form, reflecting on the legacy of Abstract Expressionism with reverence.

The American 80s among a broader selection of artworks

Besides the American 80s focus, The Monaco Masters Show will also present a selection of great artists who shaped the art of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, with Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, and Pierre Soulages, among others. Pablo Picasso’s Femme tenant un chat dans ses bras, 1964, reminds us that the reinvention of figuration has deeper roots, here rearticulated with remarkable vitality in the artist’s late period. Soulages’ Peinture 65 x 92 cm, 21 mai 1987 transforms black into a dynamic field of light and reflection, offering a counterpoint to the decade’s more image-saturated practices. This exploration of interiority finds a contemporary resonance in Jaume Plensa’s Minna, 2025, where the human form becomes a vessel for silence and introspection.

Presented as a whole, the works in ‘American 80s: from Warhol to Basquiat’ articulate a moment of convergence: between high and low, image and object, individuality and mass culture. They reveal a period in America during which art did not merely reflect its time but actively shaped how that time could be seen, experienced, and remembered.

The Monaco Masters Show, American 80s: from Warhol to Basquiat

Andy Warhol, "Marilyn Reversal", 1979, 45.5 x 38 cm | 17.9 x 15 in © Enrique Palacio, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by SACEM MONACO