Tom Wesselmann: All Out / From the Marie and Jose Mugrabi Collection

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, into a middle-class family, Wesselmann studied psychology before being drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War. While in military service (1951–53), he began drawing cartoons for his fellow soldiers—a defining moment that directed his life toward art. After his discharge, he moved to New York and studied at the Cooper Union, where he was exposed to the generation of Abstract Expressionist artists who dominated the art scene at the time: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. Against the dominance of their expressive painting, Wesselmann chose to pursue a crisp, sensual figurative painting with a vivid visual presence, deriving its force from billboards, magazines, and consumer culture, developing a visual language that was both personal and iconic, formal and seductive.

Emerging at the heart of the sexual revolution in the United States, his work was a direct response to the new openness around sexuality, the body, and social norms. It reflects a world in which the seams between private and public, between eroticism and artistic representation, and even around pornography, began to unravel. Today, these themes resurface from a different perspective, in an era also characterized by waves of conservatism, caution, and renewed censorship. Wesselmann's work thus continues to elicit complex questions concerning gaze, power, representation, and the body's place in the cultural field.

In his major series from the 1960s—Still Life, Great American Nude, and Bedroom Paintings—Wesselmann combined fragments of domestic life, female and male bodies, and art-historical references. He drew inspiration from the paintings of the great modernists, and especially from Henri Matisse's female nudes, in which he found a paradigm incorporating color, body, and sensuality. In Wesselmann's oeuvre, nudity is not conceived as an individual portrait, but as a structure of symbols and signs (lips, breasts, cigarettes, furniture, and everyday objects), which together form an image that hovers between idealization, irony, and a critical gaze at the culture of the spectacle.

The exhibition focuses on the fifteen years from 1960 to 1975, expanding its perspective through dialogue with works by artists of Wesselmann's generation such as Andy Warhol, as well as with contemporary artists like Mickalene Thomas. These juxtapositions reveal how the images developed by Wesselmann in the second half of the 20th century continue to resonate, transform, and accrue new meanings in the digital age, where boundaries between body, gaze, and media are constantly being reshaped.