Andy Warhol

Paris, Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Andy Warhol, 1965
Stockholm, Galerie Burén, Andy Warhol, 1965

With its vibrant, neon pink petals, Andy Warhol's Flowers, 1964, is a beaming example from this iconic series. Made in December 1964 while Warhol's sell-out show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York was on view, the present work forms part of a series made for an exhibition at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in May 1965. Unlike the works exhibited in the Castelli show, the Flowers made for the Sonnabend show are painted on a white - instead of green - background, several in fluorescent colours manufactured by Day-Glo. Not only did this introduce a new colour intensity, but Warhol found that leaving out the green background made the composition more abstract, emphasizing the stylisation that had interested Warhol from the beginning of the project.

Ever since the Ethel Scull commission, Warhol found great freedom in working on multiple small canvases that could be rearranged into endless configurations. He particularly liked the square format of the Flowers canvases which denied a fixed upright, thereby affording a range of four potential orientations. Arranging the canvases like tesserae on the walls of the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Warhol elicited subtle variances and rhythmic patterns across the matrix of square canvases, the amorphous curvilinear forms of the quasi-abstract petals dematerialising the rectilinear grid-like structure created by the gaps between the canvases. With the smaller twelve inch Flowers, the gaps between the canvases were narrower, creating an almost tiled effect covering the entire wall.

Updating the age-old genre of still life, his choice of a fluorescent palette is consciously synthetic and an outright rejection of the complex colour harmonies normally associated with the genre. In place of painterly illusion, Warhol's choice of unnatural colour emphasises their manufactured plasticity. Forever striving to capture the intangible transience of fame, for Warhol the motif of the flourishing hibiscus served as a metaphor for the brevity and unsustainability of celebrity - the flash of beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer's gaze. Exuberant now, but soon to perish, the flower can also be seen on a more generic level as a synecdoche for the frailty and fragility of life, a haunting contemplation of death that is never far removed from Warhol's work.