Image: Cobra Museum, Amstelveen
Museum Cobra in Amstelveen will present 'Andy Warhol, The Textiles' from 24 April to 6 September 2026, bringing more than 60 textile designs by Andy Warhol into view in a Dutch museum setting. The exhibition focuses on a less familiar part of Warhol’s career, before he became globally known as a Pop Art figure, and highlights his experiments with fabrics made in the 1950s and early 1960s.
According to the museum, the show is the first time this body of work will be shown in the Netherlands. It is organized in collaboration with the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. The exhibition places Warhol’s textile designs within the context of his interest in the relationship between art, fashion and commerce, a theme the museum says he explored during the optimistic, fast-changing years of the 1950s and 1960s.
The works on view show Warhol working with repetition, bold lines and playful motifs. The museum describes designs featuring ice cream sundaes, toffee apples, colourful buttons, sliced lemons, pretzels and jumping clowns. These patterns were created for fashion and interior use, suggesting a period in which Warhol was experimenting freely with how images change when they are multiplied, worn and folded into daily life.
The exhibition text also frames the textiles as an important step in Warhol’s visual development. Long before he became associated with some of the most recognisable images in postwar art, these designs showed him testing an image language that would later become central to his practice. Museum Cobra says the textiles make visible how that language developed while being used in everyday contexts.
The presentation includes examples from several major American textile producers, including Stehli Silks, Fuller Fabrics Inc. and M. Lowenstein and Sons. Together, the group of works offers a material record of Warhol’s commercial design activity in the years before his rise as a leading art-world name. The museum’s online exhibition page also notes that special tours and workshops have been developed for the show for primary and secondary school groups as well as individual visitors.
The exhibition runs at Museum Cobra, Sandbergplein 1, Amstelveen, from Friday 24 April to Sunday 6 September 2026. Museum Cobra’s newsletter and exhibition page both identify the venue as Museum Cobra in Amstelveen and link the project to the London-based Fashion and Textile Museum. The installation photography credited on the museum page is by LNDWstudio.
