print
- Museum number
- 2010,7106.1
- Title
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Object: Electric Chair
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Series: Electric Chair
- Description
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An electric chair in an execution room; colour variant in yellow and blue. 1971
Colour screenprint
- Production date
- 1971
- Dimensions
-
Height: 902 millimetres
-
Width: 1219 millimetres (sheet)
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- One from the portfolio of ten screenprints, each with a different colour variation of the same design. The series of ten screenprints was printed by Silkprint Kettner, Zurich and published by Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich in an edition of 250 in 1971.
Text from Coppel, Daunt and Tallman, 'The American Dream: pop to the present', London: Thames and Hudson in association with the British Museum, 2017, cat. no. 2:
For this set of prints Warhol repeated the source image he had used for his earlier screenprinted canvases (cat. 3). In these prints, however, the electric chair is positioned more prominently by cropping the source image; this has the effect of enlarging the chair, reducing the sense of being in an enclosed room and eliminating the 'Silence' sign. In this respect the prints are closer to his so-called 'Big Electric Chair' paintings of 1967. Unlike the set of ten Marilyn prints, the 'Electric Chair' screenprints were printed outside the United States in Zurich for the Swiss art dealer and publisher Bruno Bischofberger, who commissioned them from Warhol in an edition of 250. The serial presentation of ten identical images in both positive and negative iterations and in different colour combinations has a hallucinatory, hypnotic effect on the viewer. As Warhol told an interviewer in 1963, 'when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect'. An extra gestural screen-stencil was overlaid one of the prints to suggest a bloody smear across the chair.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2018 2 Jun-2 Sept, Paris, Fondation Custodia, The American Dream: pop to the present
2022 17 March-28 August, London, BM, G90, Drawing Attention: emerging British artists
- Acquisition date
- 2010
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2010,7106.1
