WARHOL/CUTRONE at Galerie Gmurzynska

June 14 – September 30, 2025

Paradeplatz 2, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland

Curated by Jim Hedges

Featuring works by Andy Warhol & Ronnie Cutrine

Ronnie Cutrone was an artist working in the center of New York’s downtown art scene for three decades whose career has been inextricably tied to Andy Warhol.  Cutrone began his New York art world adventures as a  go-go dancer wielding a bull-whip performing with the Velvet Underground, which was produced by Andy Warhol.  He then went on to work for Interview magazine, which Warhol founded in 1969.  

In 1972, he became Warhol’s assistant and took an evocative series of 3D stereoscopic color photographs that document daily life in Warhol’s Factory.  The Ronnie Cutrone 3D slide archive offers the most insightful reportage of Warhol’s world for the period these images were created.  The series includes images of Warhol at work and shots of the Factory’s cast of A-list visitors, among them Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Dennis Hopper and Paloma Picasso. 

Cutrone worked as a collaborator with Warhol on some of his most enduring and important series including Ladies and Gentlemen (1974-1975), Hammer and Sickle paintings (1976-1977), Sex Parts & Torsos (1977), Skulls (1976-1977) and the Shadow Paintings (1979).  Cutrone also achieved notoriety for his contribution to Warhol’s Oxidation / Piss paintings, when Warhol asked Cutrone to take extra doses of Vitamin B to improve the oxidation reactivity of his urine.    

Cutrone also helped design and run the Mudd Club, the lodestar of the downtown punk scene that flourished from 1978 to 1983.

Though, best of all, Cutrone was a painter and illustrator known for his Post-Pop imagery featuring cartoon characters like Woody the Woodpecker, Bart Simpson, and Bugs Bunny.  Cutrone inhabited the zeitgeist of New York’s evolution between the punk landscape of the 1970’s to the rampant consumerism of the 1980’s.  Cutrone’s life and career make us remember New York at its creative apex.  Reminiscing of another era, Cutrone said, “New York was elegant and sleazy. Now it’s a shopping mall for dot-commers. We need our crime rate back. I want my muggers and hookers back.

Cutrone’s works were first exhibited at the Richard Feigan Gallery in 1969 and have been in important private and public collections since his success at Art Basel in 1982.  His work is regularly exhibited alongside other leading figures of the 1980s, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol."