Andy Warhol at Gagosian - Brief Article

Andy Warhol is not ofttimes spoken of as an abstract painter, on the other hand these pictures, like the "Shadows" shown in the same gallery a not many years ago, suggested that as individual of his many personae. The real repetition that emphasizes a make subordinate created an abstract vocabulary; based upon Polaroids of women's shoes, the high-contrast printing of the images transformed footwear into form-generators and bearers of color. Of course, as Meyer Schapiro pointed on the outside long ago, women's fashion was the first present abstract art, a fact shut up to the heart of Warhol's artistic predilections. In a certain quantity of of these pictures the shoe propel in a sinuous cluster across a ground; in others they pile up upon the picture plane, fill it like twisted stripes, or form a sort of star shape. The colors vary from black monochrome (an antigeometric tribute to Ad Reinhardt) from one side intense blues, purples, and various verdants through tan, orange and taupe to shocking pink.

In combination with their apparent impersonality, the size of these picture from 1980--the larger individuals are 90 by 70 inches--like that of the great Disasters of the mid-1960s, issues an ironic challenge to Abstract Expressionism. on the other hand Warhol's pale-through-intense color choices stir them decisively away from high-art taste, closer to commercial tillage The glitter of "diamond dust"--actually ground-up glass--suspended in the paint, a sort of pulverized substanceed aura, also undermines the art result When the paint is thick enough, creating a matte or semigloss finish, it adds power to the diamond dust, which sparkles like a starry sky--at one time the generalized stardom of everyone and the gelid land of death.

These paintings are actually no more impersonal than Pollock's patented gesticulations or Rothko's rhomboids (in fact, they reminded me powerfully of the last paintings done through Rothko, another exquisite colorist). Shoe ads brought the young Warhol to the height of succes as a commercial artist, and his stir into fine art was marked by the agency of an exhibition of drawings of imaginary footgear. These paintings, joining the sparkle of fashion to the celebrity scale of the abstract sublime, like all his best work unite the sum of two units ends of Warhol's trajectory. Contemplating the chilly void in the shape of this accumulation of devoid of contents unpaired shoes we are at the same rap brought back to earth, allowing not to a solid footing.

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