A little-known series of paintings of drag queens and trans women by Andy Warhol will be part of a major exhibition being staged next year at Tate Modern.

The London gallery on Monday gave details of its first Warhol show for almost 20 years, which will explore the artist through the lenses of sexuality, migration, death and religion.

Highlights will include rarely loaned works such as a 1980 portrait of Debbie Harry and one of his final works – a 10-metre-wide canvas titled Sixty Last Suppers, being shown in the UK for the first time.

Sixty Last Suppers, 1986. Photograph: © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London

The display of the 25 African American and Latinx drag queen and trans women paintings is a particular coup, curators said.

They were commissioned by the Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino in 1974 and first exhibited in Ferrara, Italy, the following year. “It is one of Warhol’s biggest series of works but probably the least known,” said Fiontán Moran, co-curator of the show.

Gregor Muir, a Tate director and co-curator, almost stumbled on the works. “I had heard there might be these paintings in existence and I met the people who own them now and I went to visit them and it was quite the most remarkable thing.

“They were mostly in storage and it was just very beautiful and exciting to pull out these paintings and handle them and start to look through each and every work.”

Debbie Harry, 1980. Photograph: © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London

The sitters were all recruited from the Gilded Grape bar off Times Square and were not originally named. Research by the Andy Warhol Foundation last year finally identified all but one of the 14. They included prominent figures such as Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, who played a key role in the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and co-founded the community group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).

Tate curators said the paintings were created at time of growing public interest in gender fluidity. “It is a really amazing portrait of a community in New York at a particular time where trans people would and still do face a lot of injustice and harassment,” said Moran.

Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, said Warhol was an “artist who feels more relevant and influential today than ever. In today’s climate, it feels important to take a more human and more personal look at somebody who was a very familiar artist.”

Self Portrait, 1986. Photograph: © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London

Muir said the migrant experience was a crucial part of Warhol’s art. He grew up in Pittsburgh to Carpatho-Rusyn parents who had emigrated from a small village in what is now Slovakia.

Muir said the journey of Warhol’s father to Hamburg then Ellis Island and then Pittsburgh was an extraordinary one. “The Warhol story is connected to a range of ideas which are perhaps under question, more than ever.”

The exhibition will feature over 100 works including key ones from the pop period including Marilyn Diptych, 1962; Elvis I and II, 1963-64; and Race Riot, 1964.

The exhibition will also include some of Warhol’s wigs – almost works of art in their own right, said Muir.

Sixty Last Suppers, one of his final works before his death in 1987, is one of several in the show that illustrate how themes of faith and mortality recur in his work. It will be displayed in a chapel-like atmosphere.

• Andy Warhol at Tate Modern, 12 March to 6 September.