“When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it’s lost space when there’s something in it.”
—Andy WarholAndy Warhol’s Space Fruit series, created alongside printer Rupert Jasen Smith, follows the long lineage of the artist’s experiments in the still-life genre. Drawing inspiration from the consumer goods that saturated his life, Warhol depicted Campbell’s soup cans, Coca Cola bottles, and produce he often bought from New York’s fruit stands. perhaps as a nod to historical still-life paintings of fruit, Space Fruit, executed in 1979, included prints of watermelons, pears, lemons, cantaloupes, and peaches, depicted in vibrant and imaginative color. In Peaches, the titular fruits cast shadows in fluorescent color against a bright yellow background, adding a striking alien quality to an otherwise domestic subject.
Auguste Renoir, Still Life with Peaches, 1881, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960, 61.101.12. Peaches is based on a photograph by Ronnie Cutrone, a recurring star of Warhol’s Factory and the artist’s assistant for 10 years. The peaches are lit from a dramatic angle, emphasizing their stretched, colorful silhouettes; the print was created at a moment in Warhol’s development when he was especially interested in shadows and shading. Space Fruit directly preceded his Shadows series, one of the few forays Warhol made into true abstraction. In Peaches, we see Warhol laying the groundwork for this experimentation, using collaged cut-outs to test a variety of arrangements and color combinations. Rendered in turquoise and purple, Warhol’s shadows are placed on top of the fruit rather than behind it, lending an arresting prominence to a compositional element that usually recedes into the background.
Andy Warhol, Shadows I, 1979, the complete set of six unique variant screenprints in colors with diamond dust. Artwork: © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Literature
Frayda Feldman and Jörg Schellmann 202
Artist Biography
Andy Warhol
American • 1928 - 1987
Andy 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.
215
Peaches, from Space Fruit: Still Lifes (F. & S. 202)
1979
Screenprint in colors, on Lenox Museum Board, with full margins.
I. 26 1/4 x 38 5/8 in. (66.7 x 98.1 cm)
S. 30 x 40 in. (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Signed and numbered 25/150 in pencil (there were also 30 in Roman numerals), published by Grippi/Zivian, Inc., New York (with their blindstamp), framed.
Estimate
$10,000 - 15,000
Sold for $30,480
Editions & Works on Paper
New York Auction 22 - 24 October 2024
149
This lot is no longer available.
344
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376
This lot is no longer available.
