Andy Warhol - Photographs London Friday, May 15, 2009 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Robert Miller Gallery, New York; Cheim & Read, New York; Christie's, New York, 13 October 2000, lot 444

  • Literature

    Booth-Clibborn Editions, I Am A Camera, The Saatchi Gallery exh. cat., 2001, n.p. (a similar work entitled Hairdryer #2, 1976-1986, illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    During the last decade of Andy Warhol’s life he increasingly moved away from appropriating the photos of others found in newspapers, magazines and advertising to creating his own photographs and Polaroids of sources for the diverse variety of mediums he worked in.
     
    Warhol’s stitched photographs are clever riffs on his long preoccupation with repetition and banality. However where the Campbell Soup cans and Coca Cola bottles that had early on established his pre-eminence as the master of Pop Art during the
    1960, this series (typically comprised of four usually banal identical images stitched together) created a whole new genre within the Warholian world. The space age helmet hair dryers he captures were fixtures of beauty salons since the artist’s childhood when beehive- like confections were de rigueur. The first exhibition of Warhol’s stitched photographs took place only a few months after the artist’s accidental death in 1987 at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York.
     
    In Untitled (Hairdryer) we find melding the “women’s work” of the seamstresses that populated Warhol’s lower class immigrant childhood in Pittsburgh coupled with the now-antiquated “factory made” machinery of the glamorous world he sought out—and ultimately conquered. Seen today in the first decade of a new millennium they operate as artifacts both from our cultural history as well as Warhol’s campy mid-century effeminacy.

  • 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.

     

    View More Works

 

67

Untitled (Hairdryer)

1976-1986
Four gelatin silver prints stitched together.
54.6 x 69.2 cm. (21 1/2 x 27 1/4 in).
Signed in pencil on the verso.

Estimate
£12,000 - 18,000 

Sold for £15,000

Photographs

16 May 2009, 3pm
London