Dollar Sign perfectly captures Andy Warhol’s extraordinary ability to appropriate, subvert, and reinvent the motifs of consumer culture using his inimitable Pop aesthetic. Forming a part of the iconic Dollar Signs that were executed in 1981, the present work is a magnificent explication of one of Warhol’s primary, career-long, concerns: the social, cultural and creative potential of the American dollar as a signifier of status and wealth. Dollar Sign is an absolute explosion of color and impresses through a mix of powerful and sunshine yellow, vibrant teal, midnight blue and metallic gold. While painterly in essence, the graphic quality is very much palpable through the vivid and expressive movement of line, particularly the hatchings visible in the lower half of the sweeping S shape of the dollar sign. With an exceptional combination of color and line, Dollar Sign forms a stunning visual alliteration of Warhol’s iconic art/money dialectic. Articulated in expressive colors and extolling the graphic fluency of Warhol’s stylized dollar sign drawings, the present work is archetypal of the chromatic brilliance and graphic aesthetic that defines this celebrated series.

Warhol’s Dollar Signs are the ultimate manifestation of perhaps the most salient inquiry in Pop art history: the relationship between art and commerce. Warhol’s lifelong fascination with money as an ubiquitous symbol of wealth, power, and status spans his entire oeuvre as a key leitmotif and inextricably links his art with his own biography. As such, the Dollar Signs stand in direct reference to Warhol’s works from the early 1960s in which he first employed the silkscreen to transfer dollar bills onto canvases. Returning to this iconography as a mature artist in the 1980s, the Dollar Signs not only scrutinize the dichotomy between low and high art that is so quintessentially Warholian, but also confront the prominent American symbol as a potent visual instrument charged with ambiguous significance. Similar to his iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, or images of mass-market consumables, such as the Campbell’s soup cans or Coca-Cola bottles, the Dollar Signs explore the universal recognizability and semiotic power of cultural icons that comprise everyday life.

Representing the ultimate symbol of the late twentieth-century’s global capitalist society, the Dollar Sign stands alongside the Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell’s soup cans, and Brillo boxes within Warhol’s pantheon of iconic Pop art symbols. Created at a mature moment in his career in which the artist revisited and evaluated motifs from his earlier works, Dollar Sign is a rare, exceptional and monumentally sized example that displays the full gamut of Warhol’s creative and artistic potency. With its liberated playfulness, the present work is a magnificent anthology of Warhol’s individuated treatment of the dollar sign, and powerfully elucidates the artist’s enduring obsession with the graphic value and symbolic currency of money.