Camouflage

An icon of the twentieth century, Warhol remains one of the most contemporary artists of our time. His early beginnings were at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now called Carnegie Mellon University) where he graduated with a degree in design. After graduating, he worked as an illustrator for a number of magazines, including Vogue, Glamour, and The New Yorker. His first solo show took place at the Hugo Gallery in 1952, and since that time his works have appeared in countless exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museum St. Ingbert in Germany. Warhol was a prolific artist who not only produced paintings (many of them portraitures), but also created drawings, silkscreens, and films. This remarkable artist did many other things, too, including publishing a magazine, creating two cable television shows and writing several books. The list of his achievements goes on and on, and in the last years of his life he collaborated with several younger artists, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquait, and Keith Haring. Camouflage is part of a series of works by Warhol. Although he did others in this series, this group of eight silkscreens is significant because they are the last ones the artist completed prior to his death. After surviving a near fatal shooting in 1968, the artist died following a routine gall bladder surgery in 1987. Two years later, a major retrospective of Warhol?s work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This piece consists of a series of 8 images each 36″ square.

Happiness for Instance I

One of the leading neo-expressionist artists, Bleckner has already had a major retrospective of his works at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in major museums throughout the world. An honorary alumnus of New York University and CalArts, Bleckner continues to enthrall art enthusiasts with abstract works that continue to reach the high expectations of his audience. It is well known that much of Bleckner?s work makes references to AIDS and the deaths related to this disease. In this recent work titled Happiness For Instance #1, the cell-like images could also be mistaken for jellyfish. One of the images near the bottom of the work resembles the puffball fish also found in the ocean. Since the major thread throughout this artist?s work has been AIDS, the likelihood that these shapes are cells is highly probable. If so, perhaps the title and the pale grays, greens and yellows relate to hopeful new discoveries in the treatment of AIDS. No matter what these images represent, the artist still shows us his usual expertise in blending the abstract with the representational.