The connections between noted sculptor Sharif Bey, fellow Pittsburgh-born artist Andy Warhol and legendary neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat might not be obvious. They were not all that plain to Bey himself, at least at first.
But Bey says the links are real. And they’re a theme of “Sharif Bey: Homecoming,” the new exhibit at The Andy Warhol Museum that announces Bey’s impending move back to his hometown, some 25 years after he left. The show opened this past Friday and runs through Oct. 12.
“This is me coming back to Pittsburgh,” Bey said during a press preview at the museum last week. “I really want to make a big splash. So my homecoming coinciding with this time in my career when I’m making monumental scaled work, it’s really important but it’s also really impactful.”
The exhibit features 17 mostly recent works by Bey, many of them striking, oversized human heads with steel nails, chains and even large ceramic beads for hair.
The works are partly inspired by the West African nkisi “power figures” that have fascinated Bey since he first saw them as a child more than four decades ago at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where he took Saturday-morning art classes — just as Warhol himself had done more than four decades before that.
Bey’s works are displayed alongside pieces by Warhol and Basquiat, including large-scale acrylic paintings that were collaborations between the two men in the 1980s.
