Article
Newsletter: Winter /Spring 2006
Much of Andy Warhol's oeuvre is haunted by death-- his Gold Marilyn (1962), for example, was painted only days after Marilyn Monroe 's death-but nowhere is the theme more prominent than in a series of paintings he produced in 1963 and 1964, which focused on such subjects as car crashes and race riots, collectively referred to as the Death and Disaster paintings. This group of works inflects Warhol's seemingly more light-hearted Pop art-such as the Campbell's Soup Can (1962) that made him famous with a dark underside.
Printed in 1971, the series, [Electric Chair], is related to one of the earlier Death and Disaster paintings, Orange Disaster(1963) , by way of the source photograph, and demonstrates the artist's sustained interest in mortality-- an interest that no doubt was renewed by his near-fatal shooting in 1968. In the series, Warhol employed a screenprint process in which he pressed ink with a squeegee through a fabric screen partially blocked by a stencil, to produce an image on the paper. Warhol used the same technique in his painting practice, on canvas.
Composed of harsh images and loud, bright colors, the works in Electric Chair have a disquieting effect; in their lurid visuality and bare depiction of an unseemly fact of American life, they ask us to look more closely at the society in which we live.
Printed in 1971, the series, [Electric Chair], is related to one of the earlier Death and Disaster paintings, Orange Disaster(1963) , by way of the source photograph, and demonstrates the artist's sustained interest in mortality-- an interest that no doubt was renewed by his near-fatal shooting in 1968. In the series, Warhol employed a screenprint process in which he pressed ink with a squeegee through a fabric screen partially blocked by a stencil, to produce an image on the paper. Warhol used the same technique in his painting practice, on canvas.
Composed of harsh images and loud, bright colors, the works in Electric Chair have a disquieting effect; in their lurid visuality and bare depiction of an unseemly fact of American life, they ask us to look more closely at the society in which we live.
