Estate of the artist
Private Collection, Germany
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Basel, Kunsthalle Basel; Vienna, MAK-Osterreichisches Museum fur angewandte Kunst; Rotterdam, Kunsthal Rotterdam; Malmo, Rooseum; Valencia, IVAM-Centre Julio Gonzalez, Andy Warhol: Abstracts, September 1993 - November 1994, pp. 38- 39, illustrated in color
Zurich, Kunsthaus; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen, Birth of the Cool, February - September 1997, cat. no. 16, illustrated in color
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Works of Andy Warhol, October - December, 2006, p. 104, illustrated in color

Thomas Kellein, ed., Andy Warhol: Abstracts, New York, 1993, pp. 38-39, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Düsseldorf, Stiftung Museum Kunst Palast, Andy Warhol: The Late Work, 2004, illustrated

This painting is in excellent condition. For further information, a condition report has been prepared by Terrence Mahon, Painting Conservator, New York City. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 to receive this report. The canvas is unframed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Andy Warhol's Shadow painting series consists of a concentrated body of paintings all executed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  These works create a powerfully haunting iconic image out of seemingly nothing.  In this sense, Warhol's Shadow paintings approach the realm of pure abstraction.  By this point in his career Warhol had dissociated himself from the commercial subject matter that had consumed him for much of his earlier career.  Warhol began this divergence with the Oxidation paintings and ended it with his Rorschachs and Camouflage works of the 1980s.  Although the Shadow paintings were a new subject matter, Warhol throughout his career had a continuing fascination with the shadowy underside of modern life.  Examining the shadows one finds in Warhol's Suicide or Electric Chair painti🐠ngs, leaves the viewer with the feeling that these ෴later shadows must resonate in the same way the Disaster paintings did before.

Warhol commented on the genesis of this series, "I called them Shadows because they are based on the shadow of my office."  To create the images in the Shadow paintings, Warhol used specially constructed cardboard maquettes that he would lean or set against the walls of his office at various angles, casting a variety of shadows. Warhol used the shadow motif in a multitude of formats, and the current example is from a smaller series of brightly colored monumental canvases.  Warhol's most extensive exploration into the subject came with his vast installation work in 102 parts now in the Dia Collection at Beacon.  Warhol also investigated this simple, abstract form in different colors, scales, and mediums including the elegant diamond dust covered shadow paintings. This variety of permutation enhances the purity and singularity of Warhol's initial concept. As Donna de Salvo notes of the Shadow paintings, "no essence is revealed, no single truth asserts itself.  The experience is one of a late twentieth century landscape, everything is surface and nothing but surface." (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Andy Warhol, London, 2002, p. 51)

The different formats and motifs for this series all share the same theme of negative reflections.  In the present work Warhol's painted surface is broadly handled; his energetic brushwork irregularly fills the canvas with a technique similar to the brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.  Warhol's desire to engage with the tenets of the Abstract Expressionist canon is hardly coincidental although when Warhol referenced this art movement he was typically irreverent. Shadow can most closely be compared to the painterly blocks of form one finds in Franz Kline's work; Warhol's girder-like, architectonic silhouettes have similar profiles as the thick strokes and rectilinear forms in Kline's compositions.  In the yellow area of the painting, one can see the calligraphic gestural strokes scattering the surface with frenetic energy.  The bright and strong yellow hue both exaggerates the silhouette of the screened image of the shadow on the left most portion of the piece and accentuates the flat vast emptiness of the remainder of the work.  The ambiguous representation of the shadow reiterates its ability to exist on the borderline between form and fo🦋rmlessness.  Warhol's chief pre-occupation in the creation of these works has been with the creation of enigma.  They draw the viewer in and ultimately refuse all perceptual analysis revealing that in reality they are nothing but a painted surface—a striking image on a pure surface.

Shadow concerns itself with the complex and subtle interplay with issues of representation, chiefly of reality versus illusion and presence versus absence.  The series presents a concretized and unashamed depiction of nothingness that does not declare itself to be anything other than it is.  Lynn Cook writes that, "Thematically, the shadow has a seminal role in the originary accounts of both painting and photography as art forms.  In Warhol's variants, reduced to essentials, it assumes a paradigmatic identity, devoid of identifiable origin or source, detached from its maker or creator, it exists in and of itself, a purposefully made image of 'nothing,'" (Lynne Cooke, "Andy Warhol Shadows", see www.diachelse.org).  Predominantly dark, seemingly abstract and intriguingly eniꦺgmatic, Warhol's Shadows not only form one of his most significant bodies of work, but also lie at the heart of his oeuvre.