Electric Chair 1971

Andy Warhol’s "Electric Chair" combines screen printing with gestural brushwork. The juxtaposition makes you think about how the process of artmaking can transform a subject, even one as loaded as this. Look at the yellow, orange, and white paint slashing across the right side. The surface texture is built up with layered strokes, almost as if trying to obliterate the photographic image beneath. It’s like a painterly veil, softening the blow, but it also feels frantic, almost desperate. Warhol here is, I think, in conversation with artists like Francis Bacon. Both explore dark themes, but while Bacon distorts the figure through paint, Warhol uses repetition and abstraction. Both leave you unsettled, questioning what it means to witness such stark representations of death and, maybe more importantly, how we participate in the spectacle of it all.