Richard Pettibone Andy Warhol, ‘Elvis', 1964 For Sale

About this work

Andy Warhol, 'Elvis', 1964 (1968) by Richard Pettibone is a miniature silkscreen ink on canvas, signed, titled, and dated 1968 on the stretcher, presented in the artist's own frame and measuring 8 1/4 inches in height (21 cm). The work exemplifies Pettibone's celebrated practice of meticulously reproducing canonical works of American Pop Art at dramatically reduced scale, a strategy that transforms the relationship between viewer, artwork, and the cultural systems of value and significance that determine what counts as 'important' in the first place. In reproducing Warhol's Elvis, itself a work that appropriated a commercial publicity photograph and processed it through the silkscreen medium, Pettibone adds another layer of quotation to an already complex chain of reproduction and transformation. The result functions simultaneously as homage, critique, and original: a Pettibone that is also a Warhol that is also an Elvis that is also a press photograph. The artist's own hand-constructed frame completes the work as a self-contained, cabinet-scale object, inviting intimate looking rather than the public grandeur of the original. Pettibone's practice, initiated in the early 1960s and sustained over six decades, has come to be recognized as a prescient and deeply intelligent engagement with questions of originality, authorship, reproduction, and the art market, questions that would preoccupy subsequent generations of artists associated with appropriation and institutional critique. Andy Warhol, 'Elvis', 1964 is a quintessential Pettibone work: small in scale, enormous in implication, and endlessly rich in its reflections on the nature and value of art.