Andy Warhol — Self-Portrait, 1986

Self-Portrait 1986 is made from black paint squeezed through a silkscreen onto a red acrylic ground. It looks rough and analogue, in a way that it wouldn’t have done when it was made. There is something about the red light of the photographic darkroom and the image emerging as if by magic from the blur into focus which emphasises the hand-done quality of the silkscreen. Warhol’s eyes, skull-like and framed by his fright wig hair glower timelessly back.

What are we to do with Andy Warhol in the 21st century? Like Vincent Van Gogh in the 19th it’s impossible to separate the hagiography from the work. If Van Gogh’s legacy as an artist is an anxiety-based existentialism that launched expressionist painting and beyond – then Warhol’s self-conscious, anxiety-driven version of selfhood has, in this century, ballooned into a legitimisation of bottomless narcissism.

Warhol’s prediction in the mid twentieth century of a future fully obsessed with fame was both droll and deep at the same time. The irony has now evaporated. We are left with a bare, fake reality – it is where we are all now parked…

So, how to approach Self-Portrait, 1986 in 2020? Well, if you were born after 1980 you will have no conscious memory of Warhol being alive. If you hadn’t read anything about him at all you wouldn’t know that he made Self Portrait just a year before his death ( after surgery for a gall bladder operation). But as John Berger demonstrated all those years ago when he wrote in 1972 about Van Gogh’s last painting Wheat field with Crows, context always alters interpretation. Facts only have poignancy in front of art after they are revealed.

Text © Dexter Dalwood 2020

Dexter Dalwood is a British artist based in London, England. 
He is represented by Simon Lee Gallery

TATE MODERN EXHIBITION

ANDY WARHOL

12 MARCH – 6 SEPTEMBER 2020