Andy Warhol’s Space Fruit series, created alongside printer Rupert Jasen Smith, forms a part of the artist’s long lineage of 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 that 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, includes compositions featuring watermelons, pears, lemons, cantaloupes, and peaches, depicted in vibrant and imaginative colour.
Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Teapot and Fruit, 1896, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1997, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002, 1997.391.2 The Space Fruit works are based on photographs by Ronnie Cutrone, a recurring star of Warhol’s Factory and the artist’s assistant for ten years. The fruit are lit from a dramatic sideways angle, emphasising their stretched, colourful silhouettes and adding a striking, alien quality to an otherwise domestic subject. Space Fruit was created at a moment in Warhol’s development when he was especially interested in shadows and the abstraction of everyday objects through emphasising and distorting the shadows they cast. The series directly preceded his Shadows series, one of the few forays Warhol made into true abstraction. In Space Fruit, we see Warhol laying the groundwork for this experimentation, using collaged cut-outs to test a variety of arrangements and colour combinations. Rendered in quintessentially Warholian flat forms, the shadows are often placed on top of the fruit rather than behind it, lending an arresting prominence to a compositional element that usually recedes into the background.
Condition Report
Description
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Literature
Frayda Feldman and Jörg Schellmann 203
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.
12
Pears, from Space Fruit: Still Lifes (F. & S. 203)
1979
Screenprint in colours, on Lenox Museum Board, the full sheet.
S. 76.2 x 101.6 cm (30 x 40 in.)
Signed and numbered 90/150 in black felt-tip pen (there were also 30 in Roman numerals), published by Grippi/Zivian, Inc., New York, unframed.
Estimate
£5,000 - 7,000 ‡
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London Auction 23 - 24 January 2025
