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ANDY WARHOL, Somebody Wants to Buy your Apartment

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Somebody Wants to Buy your Apartment Building! (Negative), 1985

Silkscreen inks on synthetic polymer paint on canvas. 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). Stamped with the Estate and Foundation seals and numbered "PA10.118" on the overlap.

PROVENANCE Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York; Private collection, Los Angeles; Karl Hutter Fine Art, Beverly Hills
EXHIBITED New York, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol: B & W Paintings: Ads and Illustrations 1985 - 86, March 2 - March 30, 2002
LITERATURE C. Stuckey, Andy Warhol Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away! Late Paintings and Related Works, 1984 - 1986, New York, 1992, p. 68 (illustrated)

The present lot, produced near the end of Andy Warhol's prolific career, was highly influenced by his friendship and working relationship with Jean-Michael Basquiat. It was while working with Basquiat that Warhol developed his own graffiti-art look, and extended his 1979 Reversals methodology by reversing black and white areas when transferring images onto canvas. His advertising images are also tributes to the careers of Keith Haring and Claes Oldenburg, which embraced both Pop art and graffiti. The significance of Warhol's late black-and-white works based on advertising images and lettering is perhaps most apparent in these mural-scale hybrids of the sacred and the profane: the black-and-white images are Warhol's final subversive lexicon of street art images awaiting transposition into art gallery and museum contexts where they will expand post-Pop, postmodern taste. (C. Stuckey, "Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away!" in Andy Warhol: Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away! Late Paintings and Related Works, 1984-1986, Gagosian Gallery, New York, Rizzoli, 1992, p. 31)

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