«The wrong thing in the right space»: Andy Warhol pioneer of wallpaper as an autonomous artwork. Patterns, themes, relationships (1966-1983)

Abstract

In 1966, with the presentation of Cow Wallpaper at the Castelli Gallery in New York, Andy Warhol has upset the original status of wallpaper, using it as an independent expressive medium within visual arts, pushed beyond its former domestic use within the sphere of interior decoration. Subverting the emptiness of the white cube, showing the container as the content of the exhibition, the example offered by Warhol reveals the extension of a surfaces’ conception already inclined to all-over, as represented by the "Flowers" exhibition (1964-65) and by its precedents, that showed a polemical and ironic reference to the vast Action Painting’s surfaces. The iconographical enlargement adopted by Warhol in his pattern, also sets up an ironic device consisting in a new reading of the ordinary image; this happens even if the wallpaper itself is taken from everyday life, altered and transferred in another context: it became “the wrong thing in the right space”, we can say using an effective definition belonging to THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol, a hyperbolic compendium of the artist's thought. Warhol’s work on wallpaper has also developed through color variants (and new presentations) of Cow; also with Mao (1974), Washington Monument (1974), Self-Portrait (1978), Fish (1983) and a unrealized project focusing on the skull’s iconography (1986-87 circa).