Andy Warhol

stamped twice by the Estate of Andy Warhol and by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., and numbered twice (on the overlap)

229 by 178 cm. 90⅛ by 70 in.

Estate of Andy Warhol, New York

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York

Jablonka Galerie, Cologne

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Cologne, Galerie Jablonka, Andy Warhol - Knives: Paintings, Polaroids and Drawings, March - April 1998, no. 10, p. 33, illustrated in color

New York, Sperone Westwater, Ideas for the Home, 11 September - 31 October 1998

Emanating with silver magnetism, Knives by Andy Warhol is a menacing spectacle of death presented in an intimidatingly large scale. From the outset, Warhol's artistic practice has been driven by his obsession with the spectacle of death and most of his early series are centred around this implicit tragedy. The artist has been keenly aware of and fascinated by death, disaster, and the ability of the media to both sensationalize and normalize such tragedy.

Warhol began obsessing over his own mortality in the 1980s and commenced his Gun and Knives series in 1981. Where Warhol's previous investigations had focused on the moments surrounding death- frozen on the faces and postures of his subjects- Warhol here shifts away from such specificity and instead hones in on the object itself. This unflinching obsession with the weapon endows it with an uncompromising universality, and betrays the intense awareness of his own mortality that overtook Warhol during the final decade of his life. This body of work also heralded Warhol's triumphant return to painting in his studio full-time. Warhol's choice of weapons as subjects with which to reignite his late career was particularly poignant and was charged with the artist's acute awareness of these objects' potential for destruction following the attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas in 1968.

Sleek and seductive, Warhol's signature silkscreen in shimmering silver both elevates and fetishizes the knife as an object, culminating in a composition that confronts the viewer with a startingly sinister intensity. Knives offers a unique opportunity to acquire one of only three silver works of this motif executed in the large 90 inch scale.