Andy Warhol may be best known for the pop art icons of Marilyn Monroe, Chairman Mao, and Campbell’s soup cans, but next month a “haunting” silkscreen print of a car crash is being pulled over. Flip will be sold at Sotheby’s in New York. According to a press release, it will go on sale under the hammer on November 16 during the auction house’s showcase week, it is expected to sell for up to US$80 million.
“White Car Crash 19 Times” is a giant image that Warhol made in 1963 in his “Death and Disaster” series. By that time, Warhol had become extinct with its grisly and morbid images – clouds of atomic bombs, electric chairs – and the way print publications widely reproduced them, it is believed. readers have become immune to their effects. Of all his works, the series most clearly refers to his orientation to human mortality.
In “White Disaster,” Warhol reproduced a single image of a car crash 19 times in black and white. 12 feet tall and 6 feet wide, this is the largest of his car crashes.
David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York, explains: “What’s different (the painting) is not just its enormous scale, which really fascinates anyone who stands in front of it,” explains David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York. … but also its palette” of his images in the series in different tones, including lavender and orange. “It really seems to glow, in the way that the black silk screen is registered against the crisp white background.”
Galperin compares the size and shape of the work to religious altars, referring to Warhol’s Catholic upbringing and religious movements in his work – especially how religious iconography The teacher announced his celebrity portraits. Warhol was working on the “Death and Disaster” series at the same time he was writing his famous images of Monroe after her death in 1962.
“Celebrity ideas, tragedy, fame, death – these are themes that dominate Warhol and I think the series he’s working on at the same time, the Marilyn paintings and ‘The Picture’ Death and Disaster, are intricately linked,” Galperin said.
In 2013, a smaller work in the series, “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” sold at Sotheby’s for a record $105.4 million. It became Warhol’s most expensive artwork until last year, when Monroe’s 40-inch silk painting broke the record of any American artist, reaching $195 million.
Before opening for sale, “White Catastrophe” will exhibit at Sotheby’s New York from November 4 to 16. It has been kept in a private collection for 25 years, and was previously owned by Heiner. Friedrich, founder of the Dia Art Foundation, and art dealer Thomas Ammann, according to Sotheby’s. It has appeared in major exhibitions of Warhol and more widely popular art at the Tate Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Center Pompidou in Paris, and most recently the Center Walker Art in Minneapolis.
