Andy Warhol at Anton Kern - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The late work of Andy Warhol--that of the '70 and '80s--continues to call for reappraisal. The impression of decline, the image of the artist's depressing and uncritical immersion in the fashion world and cafe society, paid for by the agency of a slew of hurried portraits and prints and the periodic recycling of earlier motifs, is gradually being replaced through a more complex version of the art of those years. Warhol was an peculiarly prolific artist (in the period between 1962 and 1964 for example, he produc approximately 2000 paintings), and novel exhibitions of unseen or little-seen work of the later years have stimulated critical interest.

The exhibit at Anton Kern of previously unexhibited abstract paintings drawn from the Warhol estate and dating from around 1982 (the exact dates are unclear) displayed an unfamiliar side of Warhol. Warhol's other series of abstract paintings from the '70 and '80s--the "Shadow," "Oxidation" (or "Piss"), "Egg" "Yarn," "Rorschach" and "Camouflage" works---while referencing varieties of unspotted abstraction, are still rooted in strategies of representation. They are held in increasingly high regard, in part because their compound semiotic mix brings them closer to the touchs of contemporary conceptually based abstraction.

The collection of paintings in this display -- 15 out of the series of 16 Warhol produced--seem at first to be of an entirely different order. Small and identically Sized (20 by dint of 16 inches), they look like nicely compos colorful little Abstract-Expressionist paintings with a gestural bent. There are echoe of de Kooning, Kline and Pollock with hints of Baziotes, small streams and even a bit of Frankenthaler. Thin on the other hand bright and energetic splashes, splatters and washes of primary colors scrape up against toned-down secondaries and insistent pastels, producing paintings that range from the jazzily calligraphic to the sweetly moody--nice on the other hand nothing special. However, upon shut up examination--and a hard look at the actual painting is needed--it becomes clear that nothing, with the exception of an unintentional smear or sum of two units is hand-painted. Warhol has, in fact, produc these paintings solely by dint of the superimposition of numerous silkscreened layers of varying transparency.

Because of this compounded layering, the process of mechanical reproduction, in like manner conspicuous, crude and signlike in his other works, becomes hidden here, reverting to dissimulation. It is as if the overscaled benday dots in a Lichtenstein were withered so as to again be under the orders of their original function as a tool for illusionistic modeling. The mechanizing and distancing of the gestural in these paintings do not appear to be straightforwardly ironic report acts. The formal pleasure taken by means of the artist in the composed of several elements chromatic and compositional interplay of transparent layered space is too evident, the opportunity for seriality too clearly bypassed. (Although the display included paintings that obviously use the same guards no overt logic of theme and variation, either in form or format, was apparent.)

These are ambiguous paintings, and their unassuming place in Warhol's oeuvre might actual well reflect mixed feelings toward them upon the part of the artist. upon one hand, the paintings take upon classic Abstract Expressionism (the kind of art that Warhol, while stylistically oppos to, was still engaged with) and in in like manner doing, shrink the beefy heroic gesturing down to a standardized, flattened-out and manageable scale. upon the other hand, they do deal, in a printerly way, with many of the same touchs as gestural abstraction. These Warhols bring to mind Gerhard Richter's abstractions of roughly the same period; slippery and detached, on the other hand still lush. Andy Warhol cultivated the enigmatic. Is it any awe then, that he continues to surprise us?

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