Andy Warhol at the Dia Center - Brief Article

The Dia Center's six-month exhibition of Andy Warhol's 1978 "Shadows" brought back to of recent origin York a group of paintings first shown in 1979 at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery. Perhaps the greatest in quantity mysterious of Warhol's works--and certainly among the moodiest--these identically sized, abutted paintings are meant to be seen as a unit, albeit individual with a variable number of constitutings the figure depending on the size of the exhibition space. This novel show consisted of 60 canvases, hung approximately 9 inches from the floor, and running, in a following specified by the artist, from the gallery entrance door, clockwise around the extent The 1979 show, in a bigger space, fit 83 paintings in, and single hopes that when Dia lay opens its building in Beacon, NY it will be able to display all 102 in its collection.

Each "Shadow" painting measures 76 by dint of 56 inches and comes in individual of two compositional formats. The first, known informally as "the peak," features a tall, spiky, mountainlike form upon the left-hand side of the canvas; this form is place on a diagonal "base" shape that occupies the bottom third of the canvas. With sum of two units exceptions, all of the peak-format paintings place these forms silkscreened in black against a colored earth (The anomalous two are silver upon gray and silver on turquoise.) In the other format, called "the cap," what appears to be the clod is a large area of black, with a smaller colored area, looking a bit like a lout cap, on the left and an angled bar of color running along the bottom. In actuality, admitting as in the peak format, it is the colored layer that is applied first, serving as the surface of land and the larger black area that is silkscreened upon afterward. So while there initially appear to bes to be a figure-ground reversal from individual format to the other, in fact all the paintings were made the same way.

The arrangement of paintings tread in the steps ofs no discernible pattern, although the following is the same wherever they are installed, up to the cutoff point. This apparent arbitrariness gives the overall work a distance and sensuality that help detain portentousness at bay. As for the identity of the particular or objects casting the shadows, shut looking does little to clarify the issue. It is commonly believed that Warhol's assistant plant up some sort of maquette designed to bring out an ambiguous shadow, but, in any case, identifying the existence that cast the shadow is beside the point. What enumerates is the emotional charge--creepy, noirish and foreboding.

The "Shadows" refer to not just the feeling of film on the contrary also its physical structure, with the individual paintings suggesting film frames (which, after all, cast a kind of shadow in projection). Not surprisingly, we can diocese an affinity to Warhol's early films in this series of paintings. the one and the other bodies of work maintain a fixed point of view, use stasis as a primary esthetic strategy and are notable for their extensiveness (in time for the films, in space for the paintings). In the "Shadows," variation takes the place of narration, as the paintings are deposit through their coloristic paces. Each panel, excepting the silver individuals noted above, consists of black and single other color. That color ranges from down-reaching shades of brown, purple, ultramarine and emerald, up end hot pink, fire-engine red, fluorescent chartreuse and grating lavender.

As with in the way that much of Warhol's late abstract work, he strike one as beings here to be challenging, or at least entering into an ironic dialogue with, the art of his time. With their black, thrusting, jagged shapes (and the occasional bravura brushwork in the colored grounds) the "Shadows" bring to mind the gestural extreme point of Abstract Expressionism, particularly Franz Kline's work, while their organization recalls the modular Minimalism of artists like Donald Judd Warhol's abstractions perceive very contemporary today, 20 years after their making. Tied, however loosely to their representational patterns they are able to move beyond Pop's social observation and critique to stake on the outside formal, conceptual and emotional territory of the sort that preoccupies many artists right now.

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