Andy Warhol

Jablonka Galerie, Cologne
Private Collection

Cologne, Jablonka Galerie, Andy Warhol "Knives", 1998, p. 38, no. 15, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the contrast between the blacks and whites is more striking in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. On close inspection there is light wear and very fine tension cracks running intermittently long all four edges. There is a tiny spot of loss towards the top left corner on the top extreme edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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"[Warhol] chooses the common object, considered by most of us as nothing special, and elevates it to art. Kitchen knives never looked more interesting and beautiful."

V. Fremont, 'Galaxy 8' Slicer, in: Andy Warhol: Knives, p. 21

The Guns and Knives paintings from 1981-82 heralded Warhol's triumphant return to painting full time in his studio, and demonstrate his growing fascination with drama and the proximity of death.  Warhol was obsessed with the idea of death throughout his career, yet it was only in the early 1980s that the subject of his own mortality became a focus for his work. His choice of weapons as suitable subjects with which to reignite his late career was particularly poignant; in 1968 an attempt was made on his life, an experience which heightened his acute awareness of the potentially deadly effect of weapons. 

Warhol's painted subjects were first captured by Polaroid, before being blown up to a larger format silkscreen. The knives used for the present work were obtained from a local butcher, deliberately chosen for their prosaic, ordinary appearance. With no defining characteristics, the knives of the series could conceivably be found in any home in America. Warhol's choice of knives illuminates his commitment to the ubiquity and banality of certain images that he was able to transform into the most iconic. Across the canvas, multiple impressions of the knives are screened, one half the positive presentation of the Polaroid, the other half the negative. The multiplicity of these lethal objects makes their presence even more menacing: carefully arranged in an arc according to blade size, the composition seems to echo the pointed apex of the blade itself.

The macabre symbolism of the Knife motif allowed Warhol to continue his explorations into power and death, which had begun in the early 1960s with the Electric Chairs and the Death and Disaster series. The knife - a banal, everyday object - can be considered in the cannon of Warhol's consumerist images, including the the everyday Soup Cans and Coca Cola bottles.  Warhol transforms the dull ubiquity of the object into the sleek bladed, heavy handled subject of high art. Ronnie Cutrone, Warhol's photographer at the time, wrote that they were, "both iconoclasts by nature, and were always interested in utilising the great symbols used in the history of painting, while at the same time reducing and demystifying them in to popular or Pop images that would make viewers question the meaning of the work. Warhol would transform the sublime into the mundane and the mundane into the sublime" (Ronnie Cutrone cited in Giant, London 2006, p. 522).