This typically sweeping statement proved not to be the case, of course . . . Warhol had returned to painting within a year . . . but it did come at the centre of a relatively short, albeit immensely productive, period of filmmaking, during which he made more than 100 short and feature-length films. And the nexus of this burgeoning creativity was his legendary studio, the Factory.

The Silver Factory, where Warhol was based from early 1964 to 1968, was located in an industrial loft on New York's East 47th Street and was the second of his Factory studios. It has come to epitomise what most people now think of when the Factory is mentioned.

Completely covered in silver foil and paint (right down to the toilet seat), it has become a mythologised space . . . an open house famed for its drug-fuelled decadence and outrageous parties, where artists, actors, musicians, celebrities and hangerson congregated, mingled and tried to get closer to Warhol.

The likes of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Dennis Hopper and Truman Capote passed through its doors, while regulars such as Edie Sedgwick and Joe Dallesandro, known as Warhol's "superstars" for their roles in his films, have themselves become legends by proxy. But while this period is often considered to be one of the most interesting stages in Warhol's career, the actual work that was produced is sometimes overshadowed by a focus on the extravagant, hedonistic lifestyle any mention of the Factory suggests. It could be argued, however, that it was at the Silver Factory that Warhol really pushed the boundaries of what an artwork could be.

To mark the 20th anniversary of his death, one of the most significant exhibitions to take place in Ireland this year . . . The Eternal Now: Warhol and the Factory '63'68 . . . opens this weekend at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo. In collaboration with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, it focuses on the Silver Factory as a centre of experimental artistic collaboration and aims to bring to Ireland some of the most important works from that period, many of which have never been seen here before.

It is also the final exhibition at the Model before it closes temporarily for extensive refurbishment, and is accompanied by a season of events which includes talks, film screenings and music performances.

"We decided to concentrate on the '63-'68 period as this time of immense creative possibility and to try, as much as possible, to move away from all the mythology and celebrity of it, " says Sarah Glennie, director of the Model and exhibition curator. "We wanted to actually look at what was being produced, how interesting that is, and to re-examine that."

While featuring a numElectric Chair, the exhibition presents work in a diverse range of media. It focuses on film and music, while the iconic Silver Clouds installation and a selection of photographs, books and archive material are also included. This diversity underscores both Warhol's multidisciplinary approach and his extensive, openended collaboration with others.

According to Glennie, the Factory itself became an ongoing creation. "Really, the Factory was the artwork. What intrigues me about it is that notion of Warhol just creating the space, throwing it out there, creating this odd environment where people can literally live and anyone can wander in and out, and just seeing what happens." The exhibition features documentary photographs by several Factory regulars and focuses on works that Warhol created with others. "Obviously he's central to it and his presence is behind everything but, for example, Billy Name's photography is amazing, and Stephen Shore and Nat Finkelstein too. We're showing them not just as people who documented Warhol, but as photographers and artists in their own right."

Even the Silver Clouds . . . pillow-shaped, floating helium balloons . . . were made with the help of an engineer, Billy Kluver.

And, of course, Warhol had a production line of assistants to create his mass-produced screenprints. Likewise, several photographs of Factory regulars such as Sedgwick, Taylor Mead and Mary Woronov were "collaborative": they were not actually taken by Warhol himself . . . he simply instructed his subjects to go to a nearby photobooth and have their photo taken, effectively replacing the artist with a machine.

Film dominates this exhibition, as it did Warhol's output during this period.

Warhol made his first forays into filmmaking in 1963, when he bought a 16mm Bolex camera. In the past, his approach to film has sometimes been portrayed as naive and amateurish, and to an extent this perception was perpetuated by Warhol himself; he did say, after all, that he preferred making films to paintings because it was "easier". Warhol's filmmaking was confined to a relatively short period of his career and he withdrew his films from circulation in the early '70s. They only came back into the public domain in the 1990s, so for a long time they were overlooked.

His films were not unknown to the wider public: they were shown in cinemas and at film festivals and his most "mainstream" film, Chelsea Girls, was actually a commercial success. But that's not to say they were all liked: according to Warhol biographer David Bourdon, his first film, Sleep, almost caused a riot during a screening in LA in 1964, when a large proportion of a 500-strong audience left the cinema in disgust, demanding their money back. This silent, black-and-white film is one of his "motionless" movies from the early 1960s, focusing on a single, barely moving image. It depicts the poet John Giorno asleep . . . and it lasts for five hours. Sleep was followed by Eat, in which pop artist Robert Indiana spends 40 minutes eating a mushroom; Blow Job, which focuses solely on the face of a young man receiving oral sex; and Empire, an eight-hour, single shot of the Empire State Building at night. While it would be quite an endurance test to sit through one of these films in a cinema, they are on display at the Model as gallery installations, which should make them easier to digest. And, Glennie says, there is more to these films than meets the eye. "When you actually watch Empire, it's a really beautiful film."

Screen Tests, meanwhile, comprise almost 500 three-minute films of Factory visitors sitting as still as possible in front of the camera. "It was up to them to portray themselves as they wantedf The different ways that people respond to that is really compelling."

One of the most interesting collaborations from this period, however, was Warhol's association with the Velvet Underground. It was Warhol who introduced the band to German-born model and singer Nico. He also acted as their producer for a time, organising tour dates and designing the famous cover of their debut album, with its "peelable" banana.

Particularly interesting is the presentation of a never-published, bootleg recording of the band trying out techniques for the songs that would that later form part of their famous first album.

Not only did Warhol try his hand at film and music producing, but he also dabbled in literature, with his own version of a Joycean stream-of-consciousness novel . . . a:

A Novel.

"A: A Novel is really amphetamine: A Novel, " says Glennie. "Warhol literally followed Ondine, one of the Factory superstars who was known for his incredible amphetamine intake, around with a Dat recorder for 24 hours, and from that created this seemingly complex and nonsensical, literal train of thought, created from just typing out whatever came off the tapes, which kind of tells the story of this amphetamine-fuelled night in the Factory." As you can imagine, this does not exactly make for an easy read: when it was first published in 1968, the review in Timemagazine had the headline, "Zzzzzzzz".

Warhol's revolutionary, experimental openness was soon to come to an end, however. In 1968, the Factory was forced to move because the building was due to be demolished. The new location at 33 Union Square took on a more serious character, and Billy Name, responsible for painting the previous Factory silver, was not allowed to repeat his efforts. Then, on 3 June, 1968, a peripheral Factory figure, Valerie Solanas . . . founder and sole member of SCUM (the Society for Cutting up Men) . . .entered the Factory and shot Warhol, seriously wounding him.

When Warhol eventually recovered, the Factory was no longer the open house that it used to be.

The heady, collaborative experimentation of the Silver Factory period, and Warhol's filmmaking, came to an end.

However, as the title of the exhibition, The Eternal Now, suggests, the legacy of this period endures, 20 years after Warhol's death. Not only is he now acknowledged as a pioneering filmmaker, but Warhol's multidisciplinary, process-based approach to art is similar to that adopted by artists today. And, as Glennie points out, Warhol's extensive recordings of Factory visitors are not so far removed from the documenting of the mundane that has become so ubiquitous today with reality TV and YouTube.

Art on tour SLIGO is not the only place where music and art collide this autumn:

Dublin will get a taste of Warhol at Some Days Never End, the inaugural music and art festival at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, where the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) is located. The Pet Shop Boys, Groove Armada, Buena Vista Social Club and John Cale . . . formerly of the Velvet Underground . . . will all perform and the festival features a tent dedicated to Andy Warhol. Some of his films will be on display, as well as his 'Silver Clouds' and a selection of photographs.

"We're hoping to create an autumn/winter-style festival each year that marries art and music together, and we're starting this year with Some Days Never End, " says John Reynolds of Pod Concerts, which is also responsible for the Electric Picnic.

Some Days Never End, 23 October to 3 November, IMMA.

www. somedaysneverend. com