“I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car.”
—Andy WarholAndy Warhol’s Mobil from the 1985 Ads series is an exemplary work that demonstrates the artist’s integral practice of blurring the traditional frontiers of art, commerce and advertising – three worlds that Warhol fuses in harmonious unison. Pulling from globally recognised brands such as Paramount, Volkswagen and Chanel, Warhol deliberately chose powerful advertisements engrained in America’s collective conscious to interrogate the role of consumer culture, fame and status. Isolating the quotidian images from their commercial context, Warhol creates a space to appreciate the aesthetics of the everyday, ubiquitous and influential forms of visual culture crowned with the laurels of legitimised fine art.
“Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.”
—Andy WarholIn Mobil, Warhol once again turned to everyday American consumer culture for his choice of source material, depicting an instantly recognisable gas station sign. The logo of the international gas conglomerate “Mobil” – also known globally as “Esso” and “Exxon” – was a perfectly Warholian subject: while hinting at the global oil and gas industry and the commodification of natural resources, the symbol also furthered Warhol’s broader exploration of twentieth-century capitalism and its deep ties with American identity. The original Mobil sign was distinctively red, white and blue – colours of the American flag, and the interconnection of American identity with automotive vehicles and driving “the open road” aligns with Warhol’s interrogation of mass-media consumption and American identity. Moreover, Warhol’s Mobil is a testament to the artist’s personal obsession with cars; despite never learning to drive, in 1974 Warhol purchased a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. A prized possession until his death, he would reportedly be driven to events and viewings in the Rolls-Royce by his circle of celebrity friends, including Liza Minelli and Imelda Marcos. Simultaneously glamorous and utilitarian, cars formed a significant part of the vernacular of Warhol’s major works, from early drawings to the Car Crash paintings of 1962-4 and his Cars series of the late 1980s. This theme was explored by the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, in their 2012 exhibition Warhol and Cars: American Icons.
Warhol achieved the cheerful and loose style of his Ads Series by employing varying methods from acrylics to multiple silkscreen layers. This aesthetic departure from his more mechanical and serialised earlier work such as the Campbell's Soup cans of the 1960s allowed him to experiment with a range of colourways that retain the compositional elements of the original source image while slowly departing from its original formal qualities. Usurping an every-day gas station symbol, Mobil is a unique trial proof that transforms the mundane sign in cadmium yellows that offset the green font outlined with a striking ultramarine blue. The bold colours are testament to Warhol’s comfort in experimentation and, in keeping with his signature Pop style, the works efface the artist’s hand and are instead transformed into something that can be mass produced over and over again. Deliberately detached copies of preconceived ideas rather than novel forays into personal expression, Warhol’s Ads series is nevertheless infused with artist’s colourful personality – a gas-station sign elevated to a symbol of ’80’s Americana and immortalised as rhetoric of popular culture.
