Fish 1983

This is Andy Warhol’s “Fish”, made using screen printing techniques. I can imagine Warhol in his studio. He's thinking about mass production, repetition, and the kind of visual language we see in advertising. Look at these fish, they are repeated one below the other. There is a subtle tonal range of greys and blacks on a pale beige background. Then there is this white outline, not quite perfect. Each fish slightly different from the other. He’s playing with the idea of the unique versus the mass-produced image. It’s like he’s saying: even in repetition, there are variations, imperfections, human touches. And, as a painter, you get caught up in that: the endless search for an image, the subtle variations that make each work different. It is all part of the ongoing conversation that artists have been having for centuries.