“Parts of this exhibition may be unsuitable for minors.” The discreet warning accompanying the announcement of Pete Marifoglou’s exhibition could easily serve as its title—or at least its subtitle. Some images do not ask to be interpreted; they demand to be endured.
The exhibition Pete Marifoglou: The Warhol Years XXX, currently on view at the Case Studio of MOMus – Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki (in the large rotunda of the former Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art through April 12), belongs precisely to this category.
Drawing on roughly fifty works from Marifoglou’s extensive archive, the show presents glimpses from both the shooting sessions and off-camera moments of the experimental erotic films Andy Warhol produced at the Factory, alongside images capturing the margins of New York life beyond the set during the 1960s and 1970s.
As a young student—and later a graduate—of New York’s School of Visual Arts, Marifoglou worked on the sets of Warhol’s controversial productions at a time when the American artist was creating raw, low-budget films with explicit themes, far removed from the conventions of mainstream pornography. Marifoglou’s work neither sensationalizes nor moralizes; it resists beautification while equally avoiding voyeurism.
The exhibition also marks the first presentation in Greece of a largely unpublished photographic archive by Marifoglou, which he intends to donate to the museum; until now, the institution’s collection included only a single work by him. The gesture carries symbolic weight, as the photographer returns—artistically at least—to Thessaloniki, where he was born in 1944, after more than seven decades spent between New York, where his family emigrated in 1950, and various European cities.
Marifoglou’s path crossed with major figures of postwar art and cinema. He studied film with experimental filmmaker Jud Yalkut, photography alongside figures such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus, and later worked in photography and short filmmaking himself.
Out of this creative milieu emerged images that serve both as pieces of film history and as vivid records of a pre-gentrification New York, before the city’s rough edges were polished into nostalgia.
