Ferrara is getting ready to host an internationally significant event in spring 2026. It marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking exhibition Ladies and Gentleman from 1975-76, which brought one of the most charismatic figures of the 20th century to Palazzo dei Diamanti: Andy Warhol.
The city of Ferrara celebrates the event by welcoming the masterpieces of the father of pop art to the same venue. It will not just be an exhibition about Warhol, but a re-edition of the transgressive exhibition that Warhol himself presented in Italy, marking a turning point in his production and in the art of the time. With Ladies and Gentleman, the artist for the first time featured anonymous Afro-American and Puerto Rican drag queens as protagonists of his work, rather than focusing on showbiz icons like Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor as he had done until then, shifting the focus onto the individual and their identity. A new energy emerges from those vivid and exuberant portraits, creating a colorful gallery of glam-queer effigies that seem to anticipate trends in the aesthetics of the third millennium.

The exhibition Andy Warhol. Ladies and Gentlemen, conceived and organized by the Fondazione Ferrara Arte and the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Ferrara, boasts the prestigious support of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Palazzo dei Diamanti once again hosts some of the great artist's most provocative creations, in an immersive reenactment of the 1975-76 exhibition, accompanied by a fascinating journey into the universe of Warhol's portraiture. The exhibition presents an exceptional selection of over 150 portraits, including acrylics, drawings, silkscreens, and Polaroids, from important European and American museums and collections.

The dual ambition is to rediscover the iconic power of those explosive images and, at the same time, to test the surprising relevance of Warhol's research, which anticipated the era of global communication and shed light on still relevant themes such as aesthetic manipulation, gender identity, multiculturalism, media artificiality, and the creation and dissemination of a social identity.