Andy Warhol

Electric Chair
1971

This set of ten color screenprints, which are intended to be exhibited as a group, addresses a subject to which Andy Warhol returned several times over the course of a decade. In 1963, perhaps prompted by New York state’s decision to cease using the electric chair to execute prisoners, Warhol began using an image of the chair in his Disaster series, a body of work focused on startlingly political and gruesome content. To create these works, Warhol appropriated newspaper and police report photographs of race riots and car crashes, among other subjects. In the Electric Chair prints, the liveliness of Warhol’s secondary palette—acid green, lavender, teal—seems to contravene the pathos of the image, while other aspects of his technique reinforce it. The silkscreen process imbues the prints with breaks and irregularities, passages of murkiness, and areas of glare—all perhaps metaphors for the sense of absence, loss, and disillusionment underlying the image of the electric chair.

Not on view

Date
1971

Classification
Prints

Medium
Screenprint

Dimensions
Sheet: 35 7/16 × 47 7/8in. (90 × 121.6 cm)

Accession number
73.92.9

Edition
192/250 | 50 APs [Roman numerals]

Publication
Printed by Silkprint Kettner; published by Bruno Bischofberger

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Peter M. Brant

Rights and reproductions
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/7340

Part of a series:

Electric Chair

11 works

Abstract artwork with vibrant red and orange hues, featuring shadowy chair and ladder forms.
High-contrast yellow and blue silhouette of a chair against a textured background.
A shadowy, reddish image showing a solitary chair in a dimly lit room.
A dimly lit room with a solitary chair in the center, casting a shadow on the floor.
A heavily color-filtered image of a chair and desk, making details hard to discern.
A monochromatic pink-toned image of an electric chair in an empty room with visible cables on the floor.
Vintage chair in a yellow-toned, distressed photograph with textured overlay.
High-contrast yellow and blue silhouette of a chair and desk against a textured background.
Faint, monochromatic image of a street scene with indistinct shapes resembling buildings and possibly a person.