Painted in heavy black pigments and overwhelming scale Andy
Warhol's Gun was sold for $7,026,500 at the Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 10 May
2012, New York.
ANDY WARHOL Gun, 1981-1982
acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 178.1 x 228.9 cm ( 70 1/8 x 90 1/8 in.)
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JORDAN CRANDALL: You don’t like guns, do you?
ANDY WARHOL: Yes, I think they’re really kind of nice.
(from Splash No. 6, 1986, excerpted in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith, New York, 2004, p. 373).
Interesting video material about that work here
"After Andy Warhol’s assassination attempt in 1968 by Valerie Solanas, much of the violent imagery that had occupied his work of the 1960s—electric chairs, traffic accidents, nuclear explosions—vanished from his new pictures. Instead, during much of the 1970s, both famous and unfamous faces became a prominent trope. Warhol also began to incorporate different series into his silkscreens, including the infamous oxidation paintings and the “shadow” paintings of the late 1970s. Yet as the injuries from 1968 exerted their relentless and painful influence upon Warhol’s life and work, he returned in 1981 and 1982 to the subjects that he had avoided for more than a decade. 1982 saw showings on opposite sides of the Atlantic for Warhol’s Guns, Knives, andDollar Signs, some of the most ominous and captivating work of his entire career. The present lot, Gun, 1981-1982, exhibits Warhol’s full-circle return to the events that shook him to his mortal core in 1968, as we observe upon his canvas the exact style of pistol that almost claimed his life two decades before his death.
Warhol’s obsession with death spawned a variety of frightening images in much of his earlier work. His Big Electric Chair, 1964, along with several other works from the early 1960s introduced America to the morbid side of Andy Warhol, where an intersection of aesthetics and mortality begat a body of work that was simultaneously beautiful and unsettling to behold. As a Pop artist, Warhol’s eternal mission of image reproduction gave way to a nearspiritual transformation for each of his selected subjects.
Gun, 1981-1982, is actually misleading in its title. The silkcreen portrait of humanity’s deadliest pocket device actually bears the inkprint of two compact, small caliber revolvers. (...)
In Warhol’s rendition, silkscreened twice, every detail is highlighted and dramatized in raw and monochromatic screens. Warhol’s inclusion of two screens of the firearm is eerily resonant when one investigates his testimony of the seconds surrounding his attempted assassination: the confusion and quickness of the moment lent itself to a variety of mental reconstructions for Warhol in the following weeks, so the vision of two pistols makes the memory more representative of his actual experience.
Finally, Warhol’s chromatic choice makes the present lot’s subjects all the more stark and terrifying in their neutrality. They sit upon the canvas without the benefit of color, which was otherwise commonplace in Warhol’s contemporaneous silkcreens. Only black, white, and shades of grey give the pistols a steely determination, as if they are unaffected by the protests of pleading victims or hesitations of the shooter’s moral conscience."
