Initially produced as part of an identical series in 1964, this self-portrait in orange depicts Warhol directly meeting the viewer’s gaze. Warhol’s piercing gaze is confrontational, as is the entire composition. The use of strong contrast means that his facial features are reduced to light and dark tones, mimicking the effect of an over-exposed photograph. The orange background is the only colour featured. By colour blocking, Warhol confronts the viewer with the aesthetic of commodity culture.

This work was made by one of Warhol’s master printers, using Warhol’s original acetates and the same pigments used during the artist’s life, this painting is presented as a faithful, but posthumous body of work and accredited ‘After Warhol’.

The exhibition is a natural evolution for Stephenson, who is best known for his own painting practice – an ongoing exploration on the themes of authorship and the effect of external influences on artworks.

Provenance

Private Collection, United Kingdom

Biography

Warhol studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, from 1945 to 1949.
He moved to New York in 1949 and worked as a commercial artist.

Warhol held his first one-man exhibition of drawings at the Hugo Gallery, New York, in 1952, and
published six books of reproductions of his own drawings 1954-9. He was awarded the Art Directors’
Club Medal for his shoe advertisements 1957.

A leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art, his works explore the relationship between
artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. It was during this
time that Warhol began to make paintings based on newspaper title pages, advertisements and other
mass-produced images, and from 1962 to use silkscreen for the largely mechanical production by
himself and assistants of series of easel paintings of ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’, ‘Coca-Cola Bottles’,
portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy, and later also car crashes,
the electric chair, flowers and so on, sometimes with rows of repeated images.

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