Andy Warhol - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Saturday, June 28, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    Painted in 1983, this visually stunning metallic gun painting is a seminal work in Warhol's ‘Gun series'. With its shinny and shimmery finish, the painting, although beautiful, comments on the darker side of American society and culture.
    Whilst Warhol's work explores a variety of subjects on a number of different levels, this group of paintings, alongside his ‘Knives paintings' reflected the dark side of American society in the bright social light of the privileged that surrounded his art and life. It is through these paintings that we see Warhol as a 20th century artist embracing and using contemporary language, media and forms to help him explore the ideas of life and death that throughout art history had always formed the basis for great art. It is with this motif that Warhol, not only comments on the spectrum of art history, but also uses it to reference his present-day violent culture that had engulfed American society.

  • Artist Biography

    Andy Warhol

    American • 1928 - 1987

    Andy Warhol was the leading exponent of the Pop Art movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Following an early career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol achieved fame with his revolutionary series of silkscreened prints and paintings of familiar objects, such as Campbell's soup tins, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Obsessed with popular culture, celebrity and advertising, Warhol created his slick, seemingly mass-produced images of everyday subject matter from his famed Factory studio in New York City. His use of mechanical methods of reproduction, notably the commercial technique of silk screening, wholly revolutionized art-making.

    Working as an artist, but also director and producer, Warhol produced a number of avant-garde films in addition to managing the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founding Interview magazine. A central figure in the New York art scene until his untimely death in 1987, Warhol was notably also a mentor to such artists as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

     

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223

Five Guns

1983
Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas.
40.7 x 50.7 cm. (16 x 20 in).
Stamped twice with The Estate of Andy Warhol and with The Andy Warhol Foundation Seals; numbered twice PA15.033 on the overlap.

Estimate
£250,000 - 350,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

29 June 2008, 5pm
London