WARHOL, ANDY (1928-1987)

"Marilyn, The Tate Gallery" (1971)
exhibition lithograph
75.5 x 50.5cm 
unsigned
*private collection, Sydney
 
Warhol was an iconic American Pop Artist. He was a visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67). This poster was created for Andy Warhol's seminal show at the Tate Gallery in London in 1971. It features one of his artworks from the show, "Shot Sage Blue Marilyn", from 1964. The Guardian's Nigel Gosling covered the exhibition at the time saying, "This has been National Warhol Week. The notorious American wonder boy of Pop, whose painting of a tin of soup fetched 25,000 at a recent auction, has moved in on London in a typical blaze of stealthy publicity. Not only is there a full-scale exhibition of paintings at the Tate Gallery; there are early (and hitherto almost unknown) drawings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, prints at the Mayfair... Now, if ever, is the moment to make up our minds. Is he sublime or ridiculous? Or, a worrying thought, perhaps both?"