Andy Warhol’s Flowers paintings have pervaded our global consciousness as the totemic standard of classic American Pop; their imagery acting as a metaphor for a generation that changed not only artistic, but also social and political, topographies in a supremely transformative decade. Flowers #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, were executed nearly a decade later in 1975 after the heady Factory days of the 1960s. For Warhol this symbol of fragile and transient beauty was a consistent subject both before and after his seminal series of paintings. Executed at a time when much of his output was commissioned society portraits, the current work is a return to a direct engagement with artmaking via this most intimate medium of drawing. Eschewing the silkscreen, Warhol similarly was revisiting his early career as a commercial artist and draftsman illustrating printed advertisements. Beginning with a fully understood realization of a flower resting inside a chalice, the drawings progressively become further and further cropped, highlighting the blossom as the central element as well as Warhol’s deft line. Replicating a zoom lens and drawing from photographs, Warhol brings the viewer to within inches of the flower just as one might lean in to smell its sweet perfume. Each panel gradually evolves from the still-life in the first panel; by the eighth panel the work has nearly lost its own sense of reality becoming a tangled abstraction. Interestingly, the Flowers paintings are similarly twisted by Warhol’s adroit cropping and rearrangement and it is clear here that the two are closely related. His play on the traditional genre of the Still Life painting can be seen as a contemporary reworking of an age-old motif, following the great art historical traditions of Dutch masters and nineteenth century painters, whilst promoting a completely modern aesthetic. Constantly reinventing and challenging himself, Warhol has clearly reexamined his earlier motif and by hand, reconstructed and reframed it as only he could, creating an art work equally indicative of the time, and himself, as any of his other masterpieces.