Executed in 1964, the present work belongs to Andy Warhol’s iconic series of Brillo Soap Pads boxes, which came to define the Pop art movement and re-define traditional notions of sculpture. After being constructed by craftsmen to Warhol’s specifications, the wooden boxes were first hand-painted and then screenprinted, first with red and then with blue ink. Taking a unique position in this series for its combination of two subtly varied shades of red, the present work encapsulates the a period of revolutionary transformation in Warhol’s oeuvre. The seeds for this icon of contemporary art were laid in early 1962 when Warhol produced a three-dimensional version of his Campbell Soup Cans paintings and over the next year and a half developing this initial idea further with his first series of screenprinted plywood boxes screenprinted with imitation lettering and logos of such consumer staples as Campbell’s Tomato Soup, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup. Further developing the central tenets he had explored with his discrete Brillo (3 ¢ Off) boxes from 1963–1964, Warhol created his Brillo Soap Pads boxes between March and April 1964 in preparation for his second solo show at the Stable Gallery in New York.

Massed floor to ceiling with Warhol’s various box sculptures, the Stable Gallery was transformed into what appeared to be a supermarket stockroom. The dazzling show became a rallying point for both those for and against Pop art; as Robert Indiana remembers, “The most striking opening of that period was definitely Andy’s Brillo Box Show” (Robert Indiana, quoted in Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, Cambridge, 2003, p. 198). These so-called “stable boxes” set the foundation for two further discrete iterations on the theme, created for Warhol’s 1968 exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and his 1970 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art. In a cutting indictment of the values of bourgeois culture, Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pad constitutes a deadpan cultural critique of a materialistic and mass-produced society that remains unparalleled in the history of American art.