Starting in the 1960s, Andy Warhol did commissioned portraits. He took Polaroids which he then transferred onto a silkscreen. Around 1975, he returned to this commercial project and outlined over sixty pairs of lips to reproduce them on silkscreens and collate them into three albums. The Danziger Gallery in New York is showcasing for the first time a selection of the Lips series outside the books original context , but it does so without any further explanation. The silkscreens are displayed as a set excerpted, with no apparent rhyme or reason, from the three editions assembled by Warhol. All the pieces are unique and individually framed.
Andy Warhol’s process is unusual in that the lips were silkscreened on strips of adhesive tape pasted onto 8×8.5-inch sheets of paper. The “handmade” aspect of this work is probably what makes it so appealing: the tape has turned yellow and peels off in places. There seem to be several original images duplicated (sometimes reversed?) by Warhol using unevenly trimmed tape, which brings out the effect of light reflecting off the lower lip. Most of the pairs of lips are hastily filled in, with clearly outlined edges. Color saturation is such that sometimes they look like black shapes, here and there fading into grey. They become simple forms, and the original photograph disappears beneath the pattern. Everything supports the idea of work that is sometimes shoddy, but that is very alive and original, as if, in the mind of the artist, these were just tests and experiments. The work remains mysterious, and we wonder what Andy Warhol was really thinking when he created these silkscreen prints.
The Danziger Gallery presents a fine collection of Lips, and the multiple images are a tribute to Andy Warhol’s obsessive nature. The gallery’s decision to individually frame each image isolates them and cancel the serial effect of the whole. The exhibition is well worth visiting: the infinite variations on a theme and the artisanal feel of the project seem to offer a glimpse of Andy Warhol’s working process.
Hugo Fortin
Hugo Fortin is a New York-based writer specializing in photography.
Andy Warhol: Lips
From January 19 through February 25, 2017
Danziger Gallery
95 Rivington Street
New York, NY 10002
