Andy Warhol

Galleria Notizie, Turin
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The reds of the flowers tend more towards cadmium red in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a pin-head sized paint loss along the extreme top edge towards the centre, and light rubbings towards the extreme top right and left corner tips. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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With its vibrant pillar-box red petals and bright green ground, Andy Warhol's Flowers, 1964, is a beaming example from this iconic series. The status of the present example is further elevated by the perfection of the registration of the silkscreened image - still a new and revolutionary process in 1964 - which meshes the image together in three luscious films of acrylic and black silkscreen ink. Updating the age-old genre of still life, his choice of a palette is consciously synthetic and an outright rejection of the complex colour harmonies normally associated with the genre. In place of painterly illusion, Warhol's choice of acrylic colour emphasises their manufactured plasticity.

 

One of the immortal images of twentieth-century art, the Flowers were created in October-November 1964, immediately before Andy Warhol's first sell-out show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York that same year. An artist who regularly worked in series, Warhol characteristically preferred to dedicate his gallery exhibitions to a single theme, as epitomised by the seminal exhibition of 32 Cambell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in 1962. Warhol's move to Leo Castelli provided the catalyst for a new set of works, the Flowers, whose success was so instantaneous that they all sold immediately and quickly became synonymous with the Pop movement.

 

Ever since the Ethel Scull commission, Warhol found great freedom in working on multiple small canvasses that could be rearranged into endless configurations. He particularly liked the square format of the Flowers canvases which denied a fixed upright, thereby affording a range of four potential orientations. Arranging the canvases like tesserae on the walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery, Warhol elicited subtle variances and rhythmic patterns across the matrix of square canvases, the amorphous curvilinear forms of the quasi-abstract petals dematerialising the rectilinear grid-like structure created by the gaps between the canvases.

 

Forever striving to capture the intangible transience of fame, for Warhol the motif of the flourishing hibiscus served as a metaphor for the brevity and unsustainability of celebrity - the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer's gaze. Exuberant now, but soon to perish, the flower can also be seen on a more generic level as a synecdoche for the frailty and fragility of life, a haunting contemplation of death that is never far removed from Warhol's work.