Monumental in scale and rigorous in conceptual wit, Andy Warhol’s Eggs from 1982 is a graphically impactful and cleverly inventive expression of the artist’s perpetual experimentation within his own unique brand of imagery. During the last decade of his life, Warhol produced various bodies of work that explored the boundaries of abstraction; his Shadows (1978), Rorschachs (1984), and Camouflages (1986) had no central subject, a notable departure from his earlier works, yet still featured immediately recognisable imagery. Visually, these works appeared to be the antithesis of Warhol’s pop-culture fascination, yet conceptually they were in perfect harmony. With these paintings, often executed on a mural-like scale as in the present example, Warhol examines the purely formal qualities of shape and colour in a way he had not done before. Yet his embrace of abstraction was never without playful references to the real and figurative. Here, the titular eggs are rendered in flat planes of colour against a vast black ground; their outsize, ovoid forms teeter on the edge of abstraction, yet still retain enough reference to their real-life counterparts to remain recognisable. At once playful and erudite, newly experimental and still quintessentially Warholian, Eggs is a rare and masterful iteration of the Pop master’s inimitable praxis.

Having announced his departure from painting in favour of filmmaking in 1965, Warhol returned to the medium in the 1970s, encouraged by his circle of younger painters including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. His renewed interest in paint also marked a period of experimentation with subject matter as well as the process of painting itself. Using imagery from the early days of his career, such as the greeting cards that inspired the present work, Warhol investigated abstraction and colour field painting through his own visual vernacular. The Eggs began as small-scale Easter gifts for friends and family, but evolved into a complex interrogation of painting in Warhol’s voracious search for new ideas. As Vincent Fremont explained, “The Egg paintings are an example of a successful idea that he expanded upon… Andy took the simple idea of making an egg painting and manipulating the image, making it larger. The egg became an abstract shape by simply changing the size of the image. The paintings were first 14 x 11” then Andy enlarged them to 90 x 70”…” (Vincent Fremont, “Andy Warhol’s Egg Paintings,” Exh. Cat., Cologne, Jablonka Galerie, Eggs by Andy Warhol, 1997, p. 26).

As with much of Warhol’s later output, the source imagery for Eggs began with Polaroid photographs taken by the artist. Fremont describes: “Andy took many Polaroid pictures of eggs in his studio. He and his art assistants, Ronnie Cutrone and Jay Shriver organized different set-ups against a black seamless background. Andy used a special Polaroid camera with a flash that could be adjusted for different angles. The different uses of the flash would manipulate the curve and shape of the egg or make the eggs look like flat white ovals. Polaroids were taken of the eggs both in and out of the carton. Patterns and designs were made with the eggs. In the end, after all the experimentation, the flat white ovals were the image Andy chose for his painting series. The Polaroid of a group of eggs spread out in what appears to be in a random manner was Andy’s final choice” (Ibid., pp. 26-27). Blown up to many t.mes s their original size and re-coloured in bright, candy-like hues, the oval forms take on the guise of abstraction, resembling the Hard Edge painting of Ellsworth Kelly or Frank Stella. And yet, their literal photographic origin still positions them firmly within Warhol’s Pop idiom.

As the universal visual referent of birth and creation, the egg has a longstanding history as a potent symbol in the iconographical lexicon of human history. For millennia it has acted as a sign of fertility and hope, representing the cycle of regeneration and new life. From the graphic sign of femininity in Egyptian hieroglyphs to its symbolic depiction by canonical artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Piero della Francesca, Diego Velázquez, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Broodthaers and Lucio Fontana, imagery of the ovum has long delivered variously esoteric semiotic interpretations associated with the origin of the world. In drawing upon an image as richly allusive as the egg and then reducing it to abstraction, Warhol wittily references a reduction of the entirety of art history and appropriates the reigning painterly mode of the t.mes into his own unique style. As Fremont concludes, “What is fascinating about the Egg paintings, is that the artist is working through ideas on his own, creating art that was not commissioned… Andy was able to experiment with the shape of the egg as a literal and abstract form without any outside pressure.” He continues, “The subject matter of an egg as a painting series is humorous as well as intriguing. Once again, Andy has made us look at a common object, a hen’s egg, and see it differently. Andy’s eggs become abstract form” (Ibid., p. 27).