Andy Warhol – Flowers

On Saturday, 10 August 2024 at 12:30 pm, our series after the weekly market will focus on Andy Warhol’s flowers.

With his “Flowers”, Andy Warhol not only created the most famous pop motif of the 1960s, but also the icon of the pop art movement par excellence. Warhol’s flower screen print brought the artist his first legal dispute. Warhol did not go out into nature to paint the flowers after observing them in the wild. The artist admitted to using a photograph of hibiscus flowers by Patricia Caulfield, which he had taken from a 1964 issue of Modern Photography. In 1966, the photographer of the hibiscus, Patricia Caulfield, sued Warhol in vain.

A copy of the flower series was auctioned 05.05.2013 at Christie’s for € 5,700,000.

The American conceptual artist Elaine Sturtevant became known for her “repetitions”, for which she reproduced works of American and European art from the 1960s onwards. In 1965, she “repeated” Andy Warhol’s flower motif. In order to achieve the exactness of the copy of the screen prints, Warhol even gave her his screen meshes.

A copy of her “Warhol Flowers” was auctioned at Sotheby’s on 5 July 2024 for € 120,000.

In her work, Sturtevant is concerned with thinking about art and the question of its autonomy. In the field of tension between repetition and difference, her works encourage us to rethink existing definitions of art.

In 1992, she had solo exhibitions at the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. In 2011, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale.