Pretzels on silk, jumping clowns on cotton, ice cream scoops as a repeating pattern on a dress. That's Andy Warhol as most people don't know him. At Museum Cobra in Amstelveen, the exhibition ‘Andy Warhol, The Textiles’ opens on April 24, and runs through September 6, 2026. It is the first time this collection is on display in the Netherlands.
The textile designs date from the 1950s and early 1960s, the period before Warhol made a worldwide name for himself as a Pop Art pioneer. What is striking: the visual language he would later make famous is already abundant here. Repetition, powerful lines, everyday subjects that you suddenly start to look at differently. But on fabric, intended for fashion and interiors. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is behind the rights. Together they provide more than 60 works that show a period that is quite often overlooked in art historiography.
One of the eye-catchers is the silk pretzel dress from the Serendipity 3 collection, spring/summer 1964. That dress is normally in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That you can see it here is special in itself. But it is not the only striking piece. The designs Warhol created for Stehli Silks show ice cream sundaes and toffee apples as textile patterns, cheerful and slightly subversive for precisely that reason: this is just consumer culture, but literally wearable.
The imagery that Warhol would later make famous is already abundant here, but on fabric, intended for fashion and interiors.
Museum Cobra is a bright and modern museum on Sandbergplein in Amstelveen, easily accessible from the city. On Thursdays and Fridays, the museum is open until 8 p.m., convenient if you want to stop by after work. Andy Warhol, The Textiles runs for over four months, so you have time. But the combination of that silk dress from New York and sixty designs you couldn't see anywhere in the Netherlands until now means you shouldn't wait too long.