Andy Warhol — Cow Wallpapers For Sale

Andy Warhol — Cow Wallpaper

Andy Warhol's Cow Wallpaper is among the most playful and conceptually provocative works in his catalogue. First presented in April 1966, when an entire room at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York was covered floor-to-ceiling with the pink-on-yellow print, the Cow subverted both the solemnity of the white-cube gallery and the seriousness of the Abstract Expressionist painting it was implicitly answering. According to Warhol, the idea for the subject came from art dealer Ivan Karp, who suggested cows as a "pastoral" image; Warhol instead rendered enlarged cow heads in jarring, synthetic colour. The Castelli show paired the wallpapered cow room with a second gallery containing Warhol's silver, helium-filled Silver Clouds, creating a deliberate contrast between the flat, repeating print and floating, ephemeral sculpture.

Warhol produced a series of four Cow print variants between 1966 and 1976, issued both as screenprinted wallpaper panels and as individual framed prints. At his own request, the Cow Wallpaper was reused to cover the walls of his major 1971 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a version from that installation is now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work remains a singular gesture in Warhol's career — treating fine art printmaking and domestic decoration as interchangeable, and repetition itself as the primary subject.

Each work at Guy Hepner is sourced with full authentication.