Andy Warhol

Estate of the Artist
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Daros Collection, Switzerland
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol: Shadow Paintings, November 1989, p. 11, illustrated in color and illustrated in color on the cover
Basel, Kunsthalle; Vienna, Österreischesches Museum für angewandte Kunst; Malmö, Rooseum and Valencia, IVAM Centro Julio Gonzalez, Andy Warhol Abstrakt, September 1993 - November 1994, p. 40, illustrated in color
Hamburg, Deichtorhallen; Zurich, Kunsthaus, Birth of the Cool, Amerikanische Malerei von Georgia O'Keeffe bis Christopher Wool, February - September 1997, pp. 66-67, illustrated in color and pp. 122-123, illustrated in color
Hamburg, Museum Kunst Palast; Vaduz, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein; Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall; Lyon, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, Andy Warhol: The Late Work, February 2004 - May 2005, pp. 30 - 31, illustrated in color

"Atlas der Künstlerreisen," Kunstforum International, vol. 137, 1997, p. 371, illustrated
Yve-Alain Bois, et. al., Abstraction Gesture Ecriture, Paintings from the Daros Collection, Zurich, 1999, fig. 76, p. 131, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Andy Warhol: Series and Singles, 2000, p. 173, illustrated in color

Andy Warhol's Shadow paintings consist of a concentrated body of work executed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dissociated by this point from the commercial subject matter that had consumed him for much of his earlier career, Warhol began to paint in a more purely abstract style than ever before. This divergence started with the Oxidation paintings and ended with his Rorschachs and Camouflage works of the 1980s.  Although the Shadow paintings were a new subject matter, Warhol throughout his career had a continuing fascination with the sinister underside of modern life.  Warhol's Suicide and Electric Chair paintings, dramatically lit themselves, seem to anticipate these later, more literal depictions. As Julian Schnabel wrote for Gagosian Gallery, "There is almost nothing to them. Yet they seem to be pictures of something... [they] are as full of imagery as any of Andy's other paintings" (Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol: Shadow Paintings, 1989, p 4).

To create the Shadow paintings, Warhol used specially constructed cardboard maquettes that he would lean or set against the walls of his office at various angles, casting a variety of shadows. This motif is used in a multitude of formats, and the current example, executed in 1978, is from a series of monumental canvases.  Warhol's most extensive exploration into the subject came with his vast installation work in 102 panels which was purchased as a single entity by the Lone Star Foundation (now the  Dia Center for the Arts) and first exhibited in January 1979. As Donna de Salvo notes of the Shadow paintings, "no essence is revealed, no single truth asserts itself.  The experience is one of a late twentieth century landscape, everything is surface and nothing but surface" (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Andy Warhol, London, 2002, p. 51).

Seemingly out of nothing, these paintings create a powerfully haunting and iconic image. The different formats and motifs for the series all share the same theme of negative reflections. In the present work, Warhol's painted surface is broadly handled and rippled with texture, filling the canvas with a technique reminiscent to the brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionists. The black and white palette with exaggerated grey scale and dramatic chiaroscuro call to mind the silent films of German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, whose stills are in themselves important artifacts, for both historical and artistic reasons alike. Best known for Nosferatu, an expressionist interpretation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Murnau employs theatrical lighting to invert the visual hierarchy of film and theater. The actors are reduced to figures while his sets – violently scored with harsh, geometric beams of light and windows adorned with the filigree of baroque shadows – almost become characters themselves. Even the slightest blurring of the eyes turns Murnau's stills into images quite similar to Warhol's Shadows: disorienting, abstract, arresting in their high contrast.

The ambiguous representation of the shadow reiterates its ability to exist on the borderline between form and formlessness.  Warhol's chief preoccupation in the creation of these works has been with the creation of enigma. They draw the viewer in and ultimately refuse all perceptual analysis revealing that in reality they are nothing but a painted plane—a striking image on a pure surface. Uncommon for Warhol's oeuvre, Shadows has a painterly quality, unlike his typically flat, mechanically executed works. A layer of pigment displaces the pigment beneath it, revealing white outlines, sharp in their neon brightness. The effect created by these layers is akin to the relief found in copper etchings, like those of Rembrandt. Both cases demonstrate just how much atmosphere can be evoked by the mere direction of line. Foliage can be rendered with unprecedented depth and clouds are made ominous. Like the necessarily tonal etchings of Rembrandt, Warhol, by restricting "the vocabulary of [the Shadow paintings] to two compositional formats, confining the total number of hues to seventeen, and limiting each canvas to a single color, [he] filtered a controlled and circumscribed serendipity through the proclivities of taste to create an environmental ensemble that pertains as much to décor as it does to high art" (Lynne Cooke, Andy Warhol: Shadows, New York, Dia Art Foundation, 1998).

Shadows concerns itself with the shifting hierarchy of reality and illusion, of presence and absence. The series presents an unabashed depiction of nothingness. Lynne Cooke writes that "thematically, the shadow has a seminal role in the original accounts of both painting and photography as art forms.  In Warhol's variants, reduced to essentials, it assumes a paradigmatic identity, devoid of identifiable origin or source, detached from its maker or creator, it exists in and of itself, a purposefully made image of 'nothing' " (Ibid). Predominantly dark, seemingly abstract and intriguingly enigmatic, Warhol's Shadows not only form one of his most significant bodies of work, but also lie at the heart of his oeuvre.