Grapes

Andy Warhol Grapes is a range of artworks created by artist Andy Warhol.

Warhol was extremely interested in color. In the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol worked with assistants and printers to create the print portfolios Sunset, Grapes, Space Fruit: Still Lifes, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Myths, Endangered Species, and others. The color choices in these series were very important to the artist. For the Sunset series, Warhol originally created 632 prints of the sun, each with a different combination of colors. In the Myths and Grapes series, Warhol used a glittery substance called diamond dust to draw attention to the surface and to create changes in the colors of the prints. In the Endangered Species series, he used bright and complementary combinations of colors to draw attention to the animals and their plight. These series make up the exhibition as well as other famous Warhol images of Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn), 1967 from a portfolio of 10 images, and the full portfolio of Campbell’s Soup II, 1967

When Andy Warhol first burst onto the artistic stage in the 1960s’, he did so by incorporating images that were firmly embedded in the American psyche. His bright and colorful paintings and serigraphs presented images that were commonplace — a soup can or coke bottle — but were transformed by his technique into artistic icons of popular culture. Warhol was most interested in image and not reality, although one could say that by casting these mass produced commercial images in his own unique style, Warhol was making a comment on the reality of living in a world that was dominated by images from the advertising and entertainment industries. Warhol’s prints are in essence images of images. They are at least once removed, and often several times removed, from reality. His famous prints of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, not to mention countless other celebrities, are based on photographs. As in the case with Marilyn Monroe, many of those photographs are of his subjects posing as a character, not as themselves, a subtle reminder that once someone achieves a certain celebrity status, they become further and further removed from their real selves. How many layers must one remove to finally see the real person depicted in a Warhol print?