Andy Warhol’s “Massive Electrical Chair” (1967-68) is about to headline Christie’s twentieth Century Night Sale throughout New York’s Marquee Week, with a pre-estimated value of at the least $30m USD, marking its first look at an public sale.
The portray first appeared on the artist’s 1968 presentation at Stockholm’s Trendy Museet, his first main retrospective exterior of the U.S. Only one yr later, it was acquired by Belgian collectors Roger Matthys and Hilda Colle, the place it has remained for the final half-century.
“Massive Electrical Chair” depicts a tightly-cropped model of a 1953 press {photograph} taken within the execution chamber of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, a picture that served as the idea of Warhol’s famend Loss of life and Catastrophe sequence. In contrast to different works the place doorways, pipes and extra signage are in view, this portray in solely focuses on the electrical chair, evoking the stark, memento mori-like binaries of life and demise, in addition to an rising desensitization to violent photos – a theme that threaded by means of the complete sequence.
“‘Massive Electrical Chair’ is the last word nonetheless life,” defined Christie’s Chairman of twentieth and twenty first Century Artwork, Alex Rotter, in a current assertion. “It’s singular inside Warhol’s oeuvre – a solitary object in a quiet second, reflecting the fragility of the human situation.
Christie’s twentieth Century Night Sale will start on Could 12.
