156
Andy Warhol
Dollar Sign
- Estimate
- £175,000 - 220,000‡
£206,500
Lot Details
synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas
50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 15 7/8 in.)
Stamped by The Estate of Andy Warhol and The Andy Warhol Foundation on the overlap and the reverse. Numbered 'PA30.082' on the stretcher and overlap.
Specialist
Full-Cataloguing
Catalogue Essay
Among Warhol’s most powerful images, Dollar Sign distils the Pop artist’s oeuvre into a single, resonant image. Painted in 1981, when the artist was a tastemaker and icon in his own right, the present lot epitomises Warhol’s prophetic understanding of commodity. Dollar Sign combines deliberately crass strokes with the seductive curves of the dollar sign, manifesting the duality of material want. The silkscreen technique playfully parallels the physical printing of money; in Dollar Sign, the artist unabashedly confronts us with our own desire.
Provenance
Exhibited
Literature
Andy Warhol
American | B. 1928 D. 1987Andy Warhol was the leading exponent of the Pop Art movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Following an early career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol achieved fame with his revolutionary series of silkscreened prints and paintings of familiar objects, such as Campbell's soup tins, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Obsessed with popular culture, celebrity and advertising, Warhol created his slick, seemingly mass-produced images of everyday subject matter from his famed Factory studio in New York City. His use of mechanical methods of reproduction, notably the commercial technique of silk screening, wholly revolutionized art-making.Working as an artist, but also director and producer, Warhol produced a number of avant-garde films in addition to managing the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founding Interview magazine. A central figure in the New York art scene until his untimely death in 1987, Warhol was notably also a mentor to such artists as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
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