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Andy Warhol

Dollar Signs

November 1–29, 1997
Beverly Hills

Andy Warhol, Dollar Sign, 1981 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 90 × 70 inches (228.6 × 177.8 cm)

Andy Warhol, Dollar Sign, 1981

Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 90 × 70 inches (228.6 × 177.8 cm)

About

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of Andy Warhol's Dollar Signs series of paintings and drawings. Created in 1981, the paintings are being shown for the first time since Leo Castelli's 1982 exhibit. In addition, this show will premiere the dramatic large drawings Warhol made as studies to explore and elaborate his representation of the dollar sign in the final version of the painted silkscreens.

The Dollar Signs are among Warhol's most powerful and essential images, perhaps equal to the historic Campbell's Soup Cans of 1962, in their brash reinvention of what is allowed in a work of art. In the Dollar Signs, Warhol unabashedly said that "big-time art is big-time money" and, with his brutal truthfulness, bluntly printed the sign for money as the sign for art.

On the other hand, given their wild color and flamboyant drawing and design, the Dollar Signs are "artistic" in the extreme. Like his greatest works, they empty and glamorize in one stroke, making the object blank and banal, yet lyrical and deliciously seductive. Recall the famous Marilyns from 1962, where he screened the image of the dead movie star on candy colored backgrounds and titled the series The Flavors. The Dollar Signs exhibit the same panoramic understanding of the commodity, in all its crassness and allure, but focus even tighter upon its essence: money.

The Dollar Signs are signature works in the extreme – the signature for cash, for art, and for Warhol, himself. They also epitomize his deadpan genius for truth-telling and sizing-up the future. When he completed the Dollar Signs in 1981, the worlds of art and business had just begun a historically money-mad decade. The pertinence, originality, and affront of these paintings are even more alive today, as the nations of the planet combine into the biggest commodity trading floor mankind has ever known.

The Gagosian Gallery exhibition is also accompanied by a catalogue fully illustrated in color, with an essay by Arthur C. Danto.

Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol at Paris Apartment Window, 1981

In Conversation
Christopher Makos and Jessica Beck

Andy Warhol’s Insiders at the Gagosian Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade is a group exhibition and shop takeover that feature works by Warhol and portraits of the artist by friends and collaborators including photographers Ronnie Cutrone, Michael Halsband, Christopher Makos, and Billy Name. To celebrate the occasion, Makos met with Gagosian director Jessica Beck to speak about his friendship with Warhol and the joy of the unexpected.

Jessica Beck

Andy Warhol: Silver Screen

In this video, Jessica Beck, director at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, sits down to discuss the three early paintings by Andy Warhol from 1963 featured in the exhibition Andy Warhol: Silver Screen, at Gagosian in Paris.

Alexander Calder poster for McGovern, 1972, lithograph

The Art History of Presidential Campaign Posters

Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them.

Allen Midgette in front of the Chelsea Hotel, New York, 2000. Photo: Rita Barros

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Allen Midgette

Raymond Foye speaks with the actor who impersonated Andy Warhol during the great Warhol lecture hoax in the late 1960s. The two also discuss Midgette’s earlier film career in Italy and the difficulty of performing in a Warhol film.

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait with Skull, 1977, Polaroid Polacolor Type 108, 4 ¼ × 3 ⅜ inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol: From the Polaroid and Back Again

Jessica Beck, the Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, considers the artist’s career-spanning use of Polaroid photography as part of his more expansive practice.

Andy Warhol catalogue. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1965.

Book Corner
On Collecting with Norman Diekman

Rare-book expert Douglas Flamm speaks with designer Norman Diekman about his unique collection of books on art and architecture. Diekman describes his first plunge into book collecting, the history behind it, and the way his passion for collecting grew.