Shadow, 1978
Information about the artwork
- MaterialAcrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
- Dimensions199.4 x 351 cm
- Year of acquisition2010
- Inventory numberUAB 672
- On viewOn view
- Copyright© 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich
More about the artwork
Andy Warhol's “Shadows” series was created in the final decade of his career, during which he turned to new artistic experiments and motifs. “[T]hey are based on a photo of a shadow in my office,” the artist himself explained. He transterred cropped photographs of shadows, taken by his assistant Ronnie Cutrone (1948-2013) at the Factory, onto canvases using his characteristic silkscreen process. Warhol, who had become famous in the 1960s as a Pop Art figure through the artistic reproduction of soup cans and celebrities, here ventured into new terrain: “expressive” painting. He prepared the canvases before printing with a mop, gesturally applying the background color. At the same time, Warhol played with figurative and nonfigurative representation: the shadow images point to the absence of the object. "Nothing can always be the subject of something,” Warhol once said. This large-scale, black-and-white work counts among 270 in the series and is one of only five panorama shadow images discovered after the artist's death. The shadow motif is printed twice here: at the bottom left and inverted at the top right, turning the monumental surfaces into landscape-like formations.
