Andy Warhol — Self Portraits For Sale

Andy Warhol — Self Portraits

Andy Warhol returned to his own image again and again across a quarter-century of work, producing a body of self-portraiture that counts among the most psychologically direct in his catalogue. His first painted self-portrait, made in 1963–64, was based on a photo-booth strip and already established the mask-like flatness he would apply to Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. In 1966, the Leo Castelli Gallery published a self-portrait screenprint in an edition of 300 to coincide with Warhol's exhibition there, and the Museum of Modern Art holds a related nine-panel 1966 Self-Portrait, each of its nine canvases measuring 22½ x 22½ inches — a fractured, repeating image of the artist as his own commercial product.

A further series followed in 1978, coinciding with a prolific period of print publishing, before Warhol returned to the subject for the last time in 1986 with the so-called Fright Wig portraits, based on Polaroids taken that year. These late images show his face emerging from a black ground beneath an explosion of silver-grey hair — a stark, confrontational image made only months before his death in February 1987. Unlike his commissioned celebrity and society portraits, Warhol rarely exhibited his self-portraits during his lifetime; examples are now held by MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Each work at Guy Hepner is presented with full authentication.