ARCHEUS / POST-MODERN

Exhibitor's Artists:

• Ruth Asawa
  Biography : Ruth Aiko Asawa was an American sculptor of Japanese descent, famous for her intricately woven wire sculptures which are in many famous collections of post-war art, including the Guggenheim and the Whitney in New York. Forced to study at a high school in an internment centre, due to her father’s internment for being a Japanese man in America after Pearl Harbor, Asawa graduated with hopes of becoming an art teacher. Anti-Japanese sentiment remained high after the war however, and she was unable to obtain the work experience necessary for her to gain her degree. So, in 1946, she went for further study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she would meet Josef Albers. Albers was amongst an awe-inspiring cast of teachers at Black Mountain College in the 1940s and 50s, which included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. Her fellow alumni, in the short 24 years of the college’s existence, included John Chamberlain, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Asawa learned to use everyday materials from Albers, and she began to experiment with the creation of abstract objects from wire using various techniques. Whilst travelling to Toluca, Mexico, she observed a basket-making technique from villagers there who worked with galvanized wire. She refined this crocheting technique and created modernist objects of languid, persuasive beauty from lines of copper wire which were recognized as highly important by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and shown several times in their annual exhibitions, as well as being shown to great acclaim in the 1955 São Paulo Biennial. Her work, she held, was infused with memory. One, of sunlight through the translucent wing of a dragonfly, was the inspiration for an early crocheted wire sculpture. In 1958, The New York Times wrote of their “gossamer lightness” and the way “the circular and oval shapes seem like magic lanterns, one within the other.” In
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
  Biography : Born in 1960 in Brooklyn, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a pioneer of graffiti art who became world renowned through his association with Andy Warhol, and his patronage by the rich and famous in New York society. His early death, at the age of 27, rendered his work iconic. At the age of 16, having dropped out of school despite a prodigious intellect, Basquiat and a friend began a graffiti campaign in Lower Manhattan, working under the group pseudonym SAMO (“same old shit”). Spraying witty epithets, SAMOs work became notorious, and was the subject of an article in the Village Voice in 1978. After being introduced to, and impressing, Warhol in 1980, the two artists collaborated. Within a short space of time, Basquiat was represented by Annina Nosei, having his first solo exhibition in 1981. Soon, he would also work with dealers Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi and Mary Boone; musicians Blondie and David Bowie; and the artist Robert Rauschenberg, as well as having a relationship with Madonna. Basquiat’s work was often concerned with black culture, as well as commentary and observations on his own ambitions to create a place for himself in the predominantly white world of art and society. Text inevitably played a constant role in his work, and his paintings are typically scrawled with words, statements, lists and symbols. Child-like in execution, the surfaces of his works are dense, multi-layered and chaotic, often incorporating collage. In 2013, Christie’s sold his 1982 work ‘Dustheads’ for $48,843,750, and he is generally accepted to have been one of the most important artists working in America in the 1980s, not merely influencing the path of fine art, but laying the foundations for an entirely new hierarchy in art, music and contemporary culture. Also represented by: Jerome Zodo Contemporary ,
• Bernd & Hilla Becher
  

  Wassertürme in Honfleur
• Joseph Cornell
  

  Hotel Box
• Dadamaino
  Biography : Dadamaino was born Eduarda Emilia Maino in 1935 in Milan. Self-taught, Dada (a phonetic truncation of Eduarda) was drawn to art after studying at medical school, and by meeting Piero Manzoni in 1957, who would become a life-long friend. In 1958 she aligned herself with the Milanese avant-garde and created her first substantial body of work, the Volumi: pierced canvases which recall Fontana’s Buchi. This same year Dadamaino had her first solo show at the Galleria dei Bossi in Milan. In 1959 she joined the Milan-based experimental group Azimuth (founded by Bonalumi, Castellani and Manzoni) which had connections with the Zero Group in Germany, as well as Group Nul in the Netherlands, and Groupe Motus in France. In 1961 the artist took part in a show in the Netherlands, where her name was mistakenly spelt as one word: Dadamaino. Soon, charmed, she would adopt this name entirely. In 1962 her work was featured in the major Nul group exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. This same year she joined the newly founded Nouvelle Tendence movement whose members included Getulio Alviani, Bruno Munari, Jesús Raphael Soto and Enzo Mari. In the first half of the decade, particularly fascinated with the idea of movement she created a series of optical-dynamic objects, these were followed by the Ricerca del colore (1966-68) in which she undertook a scrupulous analysis of the solar spectrum’s chromatic combinations. Dadamaino's cycle I fatti della vita was shown in a solo room at the Venice Biennale in 1980. Three years later a large retrospective of her work was organized by the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC) in Milan, and in 1990 she participated again in the Venice Biennale. A full retrospective of her work was mounted by the Bochum Museum in 2000.

  

  Disegno - ottico - dinamico - indeter. progr. 5
• Willem de Kooning
  
  Also exhibited by: Hollis Taggart Gallery, Vincent Vallarino Fine Art, Birnam Wood Galleries, Also represented by: Hackett | Mill,
• Julian Dyson
  Biography : Julian Dyson was a British Outsider Artist, entirely self-taught, from St. Mawes in Cornwall. Dyson initially qualified and practised as a dentist: the need to make art, however, proved too strong and he devoted his life to painting, drawing and carving at the first opportunity. His early work, until 1975 or so, is the only period of his art which shows any influence, and is typified by enquiry into the work of artists as diverse as Francis Bacon, Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney. He abandoned his short-lived influences suddenly, and with some confidence: it was in drawing the landscape that Dyson found "a feeling of rhythm slowly developed". Once his direction had become a style, he stated that "wind and rain decide the way I draw". This led to Dyson's self-styled drawing/painting "emphasising the quality of line which is so central to these images... People and animals have come to dominate this work which is drawn quickly to maintain its vibrant quality and life."
• Sam Francis
  Biography : Sam Francis was an American painter and printmaker, celebrated for his colourful abstract works. Encouraged to paint by David Park, Francis had already developed an abstract style before his formal training at Berkeley at the end of the 1940s. In school, he developed at an early stage the measuredly frenetic use of vivid blots of color and splashes of thinned pigments that is his trademark. Although drawn to the work of abstract expressionists Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still, he remained quite independent from any one defining influence from that revolutionary group. His paintings in the 1956 "Twelve Americans" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earned him a condsiderable international reputation. Francis spent the 1950s in Paris, having his first exhibition there in 1952, although he travelled extensively. In Paris he began executing entirely monochromatic works, which are greatly revered, but that short-lived period soon made way for a return to a profusion of brilliant colours, overlapping and dripping. In the early 1960s, Francis began his "Edge" series in which paint is sometimes confined to the margins of the work, with the centre left empty and white. It is often thought that influences from Japanese painting led to this period of the artist's work. Francis returned to California and continued painting, mainly in Los Angeles, but also in Tokyo where he lived primarily in 1973-4. Paintings by Sam Francis can be found in international museum collections including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Centre Pompidou-Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris.

  

  Untitled (SF79-419)

  

  Untitled (SF59027)

  
  Also exhibited by: Vincent Vallarino Fine Art, Birnam Wood Galleries, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Also represented by: Jerome Zodo Contemporary , Hollis Taggart Gallery, de Sarthe Gallery, Scott White Contemporary Art,
• Helen Frankenthaler
  Biography : Helen Frankenthaler was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and one of the founding artists of the Color Field group of painters. Frankenthaler studied at the Dalton School under Rufino Tamayo and also at Bennington College in Vermont. In 1950, she met Clement Greenberg and began a relationship with him. She became a contemporary and colleague of Jackson Pollock, Hans Hoffmann and Kenneth Noland and was married in 1958 to Robert Motherwell. They were known in New York society as 'The Golden Couple' on account of their fame and lavish entertaining. Frankenthaler pioneered the process of painting directly onto unprepared canvas, a technique that became known as 'soak stain'. This technique was adopted by Jackson Pollock and then by other Color Field painters, notably Morris Louis. She was hugely influential, the worst criticism she seemed to suffer in her career was for her work to be damned “merely beautiful”, and until her death in 2011 was regarded as one of America's most important living painters. Frankenthaler has been exhibited internationally since the early 1950s, and has had several retrospective exhibitions, including at MoMA in 1989. Her work is held in the following collections, and over forty others: Germany Sammlung Alison & Peter W. Klein, Eberdingen-Nussdorf Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach United Kingdom Ulster Museum, Belfast (Northern Ireland) Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire (England) Tate Britain, London (England) USA MFA - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA MFAH - Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX MOCA - Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA, Los Angeles, CA Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, CA Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ Portland Museum o
  Also exhibited by: Contessa Gallery, Hollis Taggart Gallery, Yares Art Projects, Elizabeth Clement Fine Art, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Meyerovich Gallery, Also represented by: Hackett | Mill,
• Lucian Freud
  Biography : In the mid-1940s Graham Sutherland, an influential British artist, gave his friend Lucian Freud a set of his own etching tools as a gift. Freud had made two linocuts in 1936, and a single pen lithograph in 1944: they were not notable successes. Sutherland, who was a keen sponsor of the young Freud’s work, thought Freud’s draughtsman-like, direct, almost miniaturist style was much more suited to the etching plate. Freud began tentatively, his first etching was produced in the modest edition size of only 3 copies, his second only 4. By 1948, he had executed just 6 etchings, a mere 30 prints in total. Surprisingly, that would remain the case for another 34 years. By the early 1950s, Freud had arrived at the conclusion that his advancement as an artist was being hampered by his overtly linear style, which was also the defining manner of his paintings. Freud blamed his drawing, and as an extension of that, his etching. From that time, until 1982, Freud worked solely as a painter. The inducement to restart his etching career came from Lawrence Gowing, who had written a monograph on Freud. The deluxe edition of 100 copies of the book, Gowing requested, should contain one of four etchings printed in an edition of 25. Upon returning to etching, having spent so many years in which he had only painted, Freud found his line was looser and more gestural. Thus encouraged, printmaking almost replaced the role of drawings in his work for a period. By the end of 1982, Freud had added 15 etchings to his total. Not all were published, as some were the exploratory works of an artist seeking to regain his confidence in the medium. These efforts helped assuage Freud’s concerns over the effect of the graphic arts upon his painting, although by this time his doubts could have retained little foundation: Freud’s now familiar, heavily impastoed style of painting must have been unassailable. If anything Freud’s etchings had become closer to his paintings, especially

  

  Eli
• David Hockney
  Biography : David Hockney is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century, and was a key member of the Pop art movement of the 1960s. Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, he studied at the Royal College of Art. He was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries with Peter Blake, and was almost instantly successful as an artist. In 1963 Hockney visited New York where he met Andy Warhol. He subsequently settled in California, and was inspired to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles, in the comparatively new medium of acrylic. A Bigger Splash, from this series is in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery. In 1967 his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool, won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Hockney has also worked with photography, or, more precisely, photocollage. Using varying numbers of Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject he combined them to make a composite image. Hockney created these photomontage works mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as "joiners". These works show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer's perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead. Hockney has always embraced new media and technology, using xerox machines and more recently iPhones and iPads to create works. In October 2006 the National Portrait Gallery in London held one of the largest ever displays of Hockney's portraiture work, including 150 of his paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and photocollages from over five decades. Hockney himself assisted in displaying the works, and the exhibition proved to be one of the most successful in the gallery's history. In June 2007, Hockney's largest painting Bigger Trees Near Warter which measures 15x40' and was painted on 50 individual canvases, was included in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. In 2008, he donated this work to the Tat

  

  The Red Pot

  
  Also exhibited by: Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Also represented by: Hackett | Mill,
• Heinz Mack
  

  Lichtfenster (Hommage à Albers)
• Robert Motherwell
  Biography : Robert Motherwell was an American painter and founder of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, whose work was purchased by New York’s MoMA as early as 1944, when the artist was not yet thirty years old. He studied at Stanford and Harvard University, travelling to Europe immediately prior to WWII, and had his first exhibition in Paris in 1938. He studied art history with Meyer Schapiro in 1940 who encouraged him to paint more, and through Schapiro, he met many European surrealist painters. After a trip to Mexico with the Surrealist painter Matta, Motherwell decided to make painting his raison d’etre. It was at this time that he began to do “automatic” drawings and painted his first mature pictures. He began writing and lecturing on modern art and became associated with the group of American artists whose work had been influenced by the Surrealists’ ideas -Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, William Baziotes, and Hans Hofmann. Although the youngest of this group, Motherwell was their spokesman and, with his easy, intellectual disposition, became the voice of America’s avant-garde. In 1944 Motherwell held his first New York solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's ‘Art of This Century’ gallery; that same year the Museum of Modern Art was the first museum to purchase one of his works. In 1948, he began to work with his celebrated Elegy to the Spanish Republic theme, which he continued to develop throughout his life. Motherwell reached his mature style soon after, creating large paintings that employ simple shapes in a manner reminiscent of Franz Kline’s forceful black on white images. Unlike Kline, Motherwell’s paintings had a strong political and literary content, specifically in his Elegies. During the 1950s and 1960s, Motherwell expanded his writings on art, and as a leading art theorist taught painting at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where his pupils included Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland. In 1
  Also exhibited by: Hollis Taggart Gallery, Vincent Vallarino Fine Art, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Elizabeth Clement Fine Art, Also represented by: KM Fine Arts | Chicago - Los Angeles, Hackett | Mill, SENSE fine art,
• Hughie O'Donoghue
  Biography : Although born in Manchester, as was his father, Hughie O'Donoghue is considered to be an Irish artist, not least by himself. Born of an Irish mother and of Irish descent on his father's side, he spent much of his childhood in Co. Mayo. As soon as he was able he built an enormous studio in Ireland in which to work, near Thomastown in Co. Kilkenny. O'Donoghue studied at Goldsmiths College and upon graduation became artist-in-residence, first at Drax power station in Yorkshire and then, in London's National Gallery. O'Donoghue's work is concerned with history, and he has presented this concern variously throughout his career. His early, monumental series' Sleeper and Red Earth interpret the history of the ground itself, exploring what the soil may hold and why: examining the bodies placed in it or that may have fallen or otherwise come to be there. His father's experiences throughout the Second World War became a starting point for a prodigious consideration of that period through the medium of richly surfaced paint. History as memory is another facet of this muse. Discovered and given his first serious exhibitions by Fabian Carlsson in London in the late 1980s, within ten years O'Donoghue was showing more frequently in institutions than he was in commercial galleries. Some curious choices of representation have protracted the advancement of his career, however he was signed by Marlborough Fine Art in 2011 and should now be well placed to be considered one of Great Britain and Ireland's most important living painters. ARCHEUS / POST-MODERN are principal dealers in Hughie O'Donoghue's early works and his graphic works. The following institutions hold his work: Arts Council Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia Ashmolean Museum of Art, Oxford, England Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England British Museum, London, England Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, England Cleveland County Museums, Middlesbrough, England
• Pablo Picasso
  Biography : In 1946 Picasso visited a pottery exhibition in Vallauris, close to Golfe Juan, as he had recently become interested in ceramics, and wanted to investigate the medium further. The Madoura workshop was exhibiting at the show, and their work caught the artist's eye. He asked to be introduced to the owners, Suzanne and Georges Ramié, who were delighted to meet the great man. Picasso asked a few questions about method and technicality but, as the actual workshop was very close by, Mons. & Mme. Ramié invited Picasso to go with them to see for himself. An excited & curious Picasso enthusiastically accepted and, immediately upon arriving at the workshop, made three pieces which he left to dry and bake. It was a year before Picasso returned to Vallauris to examine the ceramics, but he was very happy with the way things had turned out. Soon, Picasso had his own area within the Madoura workshop where he began to work and where over the next quarter-century he would produce 633 pieces. Aside from artistic diversity and his natural enthusiasm for a new medium, one of the driving forces behind his prolific work at Madoura was the desire to create ceramics as multiples, that Madoura should produce and sell inexpensively so that everyone could own a Picasso. Suzanne Ramié shared her vast experience with Picasso, teaching him all she knew of ceramics. Picasso being Picasso, however, it was not very long before he took the medium in new directions, creating some of his most memorable and popular images.

  

  Modèle posant et Peintre

  

  Jeune Femme au Corsage à Triangles

  
  Also exhibited by: Contessa Gallery, Jane Kahan Gallery, Leslie Smith Gallery, Also represented by: Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Jerome Zodo Contemporary , KM Fine Arts | Chicago - Los Angeles, Meyerovich Gallery,
• Richard Prince
  

  Self-Portrait as a Hippie
• Bridget Riley
  Biography : After a period of quasi-impressionism in her formative years, by 1960 and approaching her late-twenties, Riley settled into a dynamic style of hard-edged abstraction with, often, wild optical properties. She came to international attention in 1965 when her work was included in MoMA’s famous exhibition The Responsive Eye, presenting her pictures with other artists of the Op Art movement, and illustrating her painting Current on the cover. She worked almost exclusively in a black, white and grey palette until 1967, when colour was allowed into her work and the first of the famous stripe paintings was produced. In the following year she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Bridget Riley is generally considered to be the most important woman artist living in Britain. Several rare catalogues and books about Bridget Riley are available for sale in our bookshop.
• Ed Ruscha
  Biography : Ed Ruscha is an American painter, printmaker and photographer, living and working in Los Angeles. Ruscha first came to prominence there in the late 1950s with small collages that he made which were influenced by those of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Soon he began to refine his collages, isolating and recombining words and images in increasingly subtle and unique ways. Words, in paintings, are often very awkward things to incorporate harmoniously and there are very few artists, notably Picasso in his cubist works, who have succeeded happily. By making single words and phrases the subject of his work, Ruscha mastered his intentions. Because he drew upon sources from the real world and the imagery of commercial culture, Ruscha's work is associated with Pop art. In 1962 Ruscha's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Jim Dine, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first Pop art exhibitions in America. Ruscha had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1966, Ruscha was included in Los Angeles Now at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, his first European exhibition. Ruscha joined the influential Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1970 and had his first solo exhibition there in 1973. Also in 1970 Ruscha represented the United States at the Venice Biennale as part of a survey of American printmaking with an on-site workshop. He constructed Chocolate Room, a visual and sensory experience where the visitor saw 360 pieces of paper permeated with chocolate and hung on the gallery walls. The pavilion in Venice smelled like a chocolate factory. He had begun to use unconventional materials in his graphic work of that period: he drew with gunpowder and painted and printed with foodstuffs and with

  

  Mocha Standard

  Also represented by: Modernism Inc.,
• Ed Ruscha
  

  Cheese Mold Standard with Olive

  Also represented by: Modernism Inc.,
• William Scott
  Biography : Photograph: William Scott and Stanley Jones at the Curwen Studio, 1961* William Scott was one of the first artists in Britain, along with Patrick Heron, to develop a dialogue with America's Abstract Expressionists and to evolve this influence into an independently British movement. Although born in Scotland in 1913, he is generally held by the Irish to be one of their own, having grown up in Northern Ireland from the age of 9 and having studied at the Belfast School of Art. Scott matured into an internationally famous artist, and at the height of his career he would represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. His early career was varied. Studies at the Royal Academy Schools, of both sculpture and painting, preceded travels, studies, exhibitions and the establishment of an art school in France. World War II forced him to return to England and he joined the Army, becoming a lithographic draughtsman with the Royal Engineers. After the war, he took up the position of Senior Painting Master at the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court. His painting, until the early 1950s was realistic in style with a preoccupation for still-life, although this soon changed. Scott travelled frequently to Cornwall where he had become friends with many of the St Ives Group of artists. He, and others from that group, was one of the sixty artists invited by the Arts Council to exhibit as part of the celebrations of the Festival of Britain. Scott’s work moved closer to non-figuration and, in 1953, an extended visit to North America resulted in friendships with New York based artists including Rothko and de Kooning. By 1956, Scott’s success as an artist, both nationally and internationally, allowed him to give up full-time teaching, although he would remain interested in, and involved with, art school education for the rest of his life. In 1958 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, one of many occasions on which his work was chosen by the British Council to

  

  Blue, Yellow and Red

  

  Fish On A Plate (Also known as 'Fish')
• Pierre Soulages
  Biography : Pierre Soulages is the last, great, living painter to have been involved at the beginning of Art Informel, the post-war movement which encompassed Tachisme, Abstraction Lyrique, Gutai and CoBrA, that was the European concurrent of Abstract Expressionism and which favoured abandonment of any premeditated approach. Born in 1919, in Rodez, France, where a museum devoted to his work will open this year, Soulages became known as “the painter of black”. By 1946, having rejected formal art training before the war, Soulages established a studio in Paris and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1947, having his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Lydia Conti in 1949. The paucity of colour in his work set him apart from his contemporaries and established him quickly as an intellectual leader of the Jeune École de Paris, but his rejection of a total abandonment of formality soon set him at odds with the principles of the Informelistes and since the early 1950s, Soulages has defied classification. A looser style of brushwork increasingly defined his method throughout the 1950s, and a fascination with the surface reflection of, and contrasts within, pure tones of black began to steer his exploration as an artist. A visit to Japan in 1958 cemented his interest in painted large-scale calligraphy, and this influence is clearly visible for prolonged periods throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Soulages was regularly included in the influential Documenta exhibitions and his first major travelling retrospective took place in Hanover, Essen and The Hague during 1960 and 1961. Soulages’ fascination with black, the tone with which he had come almost exclusively to mark his canvases, became a practical obsession in 1979 with the creation of his first outrenoir (beyond black) paintings. With outrenoir, black became the starting point of a painting, the canvas itself, upon which he would perform dynamic actions with the brush or palette-knife. In this way, through scoring
• Andy Warhol
  Biography : Andy Warhol was an American artist and a leading figure in the pop art movement, responsible for creating many of its most memorable images. Initially a commercial illustrator, Warhol's work appropriated commercial advertising images and celebrity portraits in his paintings and, with Robert Rauschenberg, he was almost singly responsible for the re-establishment of silkscreen printing in contemporary art of the post-war period. Notable as a gay man who lived openly long before before the safety of general liberalism, his studio, The Factory, became a gathering place for intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, bohemians, celebrities, and patrons. Initially criticised as vacuous, Warhol's art, superficiality and commercialism has since been described as 'the most perfect mirror of our times'. His instantly recognisable takes on Marilyn Monroe, the Brillo Box, Elvis, the Dollar Sign, the Campbell's soup can and Coca-Cola are now arguably as familiar as the origins of each icon itself. Warhol had this observation about Coca-Cola: "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." Surviving a near-fatal gunshot wound in 1968 inflicted by Valerie Solaris, feminist author of the S.C.U.M Manifesto, the wild Factory days were declared to be over and Warhol became more insular and entrepreneurial, socialising only in the most exclusive circles of Studio 54 and in Hollywood. Before his premature death in 1987, he worked with Jean-Michael Basquiat and many of th
  Also exhibited by: Contessa Gallery, Hollis Taggart Gallery, Abby M. Taylor Fine Art LLC, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Also represented by: KM Fine Arts | Chicago - Los Angeles, Modernism Inc., Galerie Ernst Hilger,