World Wide Warhol is a four week exhibition I have held in galerie S&S, a small but cozy gallery in my hometown Antwerp, with finissage on June 22nd, 2025. Two years ago I organized an exhibition in the same venue with Warhol’s book and magazine illustrations, this year I showed my complete collection of Andy Warhol record cover art. The title refers to the fact that next to all albums released in the US, the exhibition also focussed on all known variants of records with Warhol cover art released overseas in the 1950ies, when RCA Victor launched a world wide distribution campaign in 1956. To my knowledge this had never been done before in a Warhol cover exhibition.

It was fun showing all different versions next to each other, in a sort of Warholian repetition: 8 Count Basies, 11 Joe Newmans I’m Still Swinging, and so on. Releases from Japan, Germany, Sweden, Australia or Brazil. Some releases quite rare and unknown, as for instance a Japanese 10 inch LP of I’m Still Swinging (1956), two Japanese EP’s with classical music appropriating Warhol’s drawing of angels for the jazz album Cool Gabriels, or the Brazilian 1957 Artie Shaw LP Meu Concerto.

Of course the exhibition does not stop at the Fifties. What would a Warhol album cover exhibition be without some peelable Velvet Underground bananas or The Stones’ Sticky Fingers with working zippers? Still controversial covers, so it seems: a picture of the complete cabinet at the right, with 4 Sticky Fingers albums (last one stripped to the underwear) and 4 banana covers (last one peeled) was removed from my Facebook page by the Meta police.

In total my exhibition counts about 250 items, including promotional posters, printer’s proofs for the Rolling Stones Love You Live cover art, a large poster designed for the Love You Live launch party in 1977, a Paul Anka promotianal light box, cassettes , tapes and cd long boxes, about 25 parodies of the Velvet Underground banana cover, and much more.

Especially for this exhibition I have written a tiny catalogue (24 pages, 100 copies), which lists all the ‘overseas’ records with Warhol cover art from the 1950ies. The cover is silkscreened and the booklet hand bound by gallery owner Walter Siemons.