Andy Warhol’s fascination with popular images is combined with spiritual concerns in these paintings from the 1980s.
This display of work by Andy Warhol forms part of a collection of international contemporary art jointly owned by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. It is known as ARTIST ROOMS and focuses on individual rooms devoted to particular artists.
Warhol started his professional life as a commercial illustrator. Even when he crossed over to the fine art world in the early 1960s, his work often alluded to advertising and marketing, featuring iconic brands such as Coca-Cola and Campbell’s Soup. In these paintings from the 1980s he continues to borrow and reproduce popular images, but they tend to be drawn from low-budget newsprint advertisements, evangelical leaflets and food wrappers. He collected a great archive of ‘trash’ imagery. Some of his sources make great claims for their spiritual or political significance, but they can also be read as unsophisticated pictures circulated by and for people with little cultural power. Around the same time, Warhol was working on a series of paintings based on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, and his approach registered little difference between the Renaissance masterpiece and these street images and classified ads.
In a sense, Warhol was revisiting his work as an advertising illustrator. Many of these works borrow from promotional drawing rather than publicity photography, and often incorporate text. But, using silkscreen to reproduce them, he undermines the uniqueness of hand-drawn material by placing duplicate images next to one another. As always, his work blurs the line between high and popular culture, individuality and mass production.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was born in Pittsburgh. He lived and worked in New York.
ARTIST ROOMS was established through The d’Offay Donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments, and is being shared with museums and galleries throughout the UK with additional generous support from The Art Fund and the Scottish Government.
Curated by Matthew Gale and Ann Coxon
Text by Minnie Scott
