Electric Chair (complete set)

Warhol sourced his image from a press photograph taken in 1953, the year Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing for espionage. The image – an anonymous interior, a plain wooden chair with its leather restraints, a sign reading SILENCE on the wall behind – had already accumulated a specific and terrible weight before Warhol encountered it. His intervention was to repeat it and to colour it, stripping any residual journalistic neutrality by cycling the chair through 10 distinct chromatic states.

Across the set, the same chair appears in acid yellow, deep purple, near-white, rich orange-multicolour, cool navy and other combinations, each one altering the emotional register without touching the underlying image. In some colourways the chair reads as almost decorative; in others it recedes towards near-invisibility. This instability is the point. Electric Chair belongs to Warhol's sustained engagement with catastrophe and mass reproduction – an inquiry he had begun in the early 1960s with the Death and Disaster canvases. By 1971, he had long established that repetition dulls, and that colour can both amplify and anaesthetise simultaneously. The complete set makes that argument visible across 10 consecutive states.