Flash—November 22, 1963 1968

Andy Warhol made this screenprint entitled 'Flash—November 22, 1963' sometime around that date. This piece exemplifies how Warhol approached artmaking as a process of repetition and reproduction. The flat, almost sterile quality of the print, with its repetitive imagery, denies the gestural expression we might expect. Look at the evenness of the colour, the way the images are stacked, row upon row. It's a mechanical process laid bare. See how the silver shimmers ever so slightly in the light, hinting at a decorative quality amidst all the repetition? That glimmer is what gives the print a strange sort of life. Warhol, like Rauschenberg, understood that art could be about the everyday, the mass-produced, and the mediated. His work opened a door for so many of us to think about what art could be in a world saturated with images. It encourages us to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the beauty in the mundane.