Thrumming with drama and haunting intensity, the veiled silhouette of six kitchen knives in the present work confronts the viewer with stark, menacing immediacy. While Warhol’s fascination with the spectacle of death was a recurrent motif throughout his career, it was in the 1980s that Warhol’s growing concerns over his own impending mortality became a subject of his work more explicitly. No series demonstrates this fascination with the drama and proximity of death so clearly as his Gun and Knives paintings from 1981-82, the body of work which 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 monochrome silkscreen both elevates and fetishizes the knife as an object, culminating in a composition that confronts the viewer with a startingly sinister intensity. Enlarged and mechanically repeated in six overlapping impressions across the canvas, the black silhouetted forms hover menacingly against a silvery white background. In their careful arrangement, the blades appear to coalesce into a single, cavernous black apex, the tonal polarization of the silkscreen impression and lack of depth inherent to the medium amplifying their intrigue And yet, the Warholian brilliance of this chosen subject matter is that Warhol’s knives are, in fact, a domestic household utensil, as universal as his consumerist Coca-Cola bottles or Campbell soup cans. Warhol transforms the familiarity and dull ubiquity of this quotidian object into the sleek bladed, heavy handled subject of high art, endowing these standard kitchen utensils with a startling, seductive grandeur and menacing threat. And further, through serial repetition, Warhol both neutralizes the subject matter and amplifies its threat. He reminds us of the proximity of our own mortality, while also showcasing the anesthetizing power of the mechanical reproduction of images. With devastating efficiency, Warhol's Knives both seduces and chills with a stunning aesthetic and sinister macabre.

As is typical of his still life paintings, Warhol began from Polaroid photographs. Studio manager Vincent Fremond recalls that originally, “Andy wanted to photograph exotic knives and daggers. We knew that Chris Stein from Blondie collected handmade knives and unusual daggers. Chris brought some to the studio for Andy to photograph. But after reviewing the pictures, Andy asked Jay Shriver, his new art assistant, to buy some ordinary kitchen knives from a Bowery restaurant supply store. Jay came back with some Galaxy 8-inch slicers and, of course, a receipt. Andy photographed the ordinary knives in various formations and they were chosen.” (Vincent Fremont, quoted in: Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Work of Andy Warhol, Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, 2006, p. 157)

From the outset, Warhol's artistic practice has been driven by his obsession with the spectacle of death: both as explicit horror in the Death and Disaster series, and as implicit tragedy in Electric Chairs, Marilyns and Jackies. Beginning before his first silkscreens with his earliest Pop paintings such as 129 Die in Jet! from 1962, Warhol has been keenly aware of and fascinated by death, disaster, and the ability of the media to both sensationalize and normalize such tragedy. Turning ubiquity and banality into high art, Warhol’s practice monumentalizes the ordinary while simultaneously acknowledging through its own production how the media generates images of violence through a framework that divorces the image from the aggression and cruelty of the event. Nevertheless, the raw power of this confrontational image remains urgently accosting, despite our immersion in supposedly desensitizing mass-media representations of weapons of violence. Warhol’s paintings of Knives and Guns in the early 1980s present an extension of this fascination, yet while Warhol’s previous investigations focus 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.

Artist

Andy Warhol