"Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland" from "Reigning Queens"
Screenprint, 1985, signed and numbered 29/40, printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, New York and published by George C.P. Mulder, Amsterdam. S: 100 x 80 cm.
Provenance
Galerie Börjesson, Malmö.
Literature
Feldman II 347.
More information
“I want to be as famous as the Queen of England.”
Andy Warhol’s world is made up by many beautiful, strong and famous women. He has through his work made them even more iconic and his fascination for women can not be denied. Most of the women he portrayed are from the world of pop culture but in 1985 he started his work with royalties in the series “Reigning Queens”. In the series, consisting of four screenprints in four colour variations, he portrayed four (at the time) reigning queens: Elisabeth II of England, Beatrix of the Netherlands, Margarethe II of Denmark and Ntombi Twala of Swaziland. In the series Warhol continued his practice of manipulating existing photographs and the repetition of the portrait showcases Warhol’s interest with mass imagery and repetition, as they are reminders of the royal portraits printed on postage stamps and currency. It would not be right not to point out that each queen that Warhol chose for the series where queens by birth, not by marriage and it is possible Warhol intentionally created this portfolio as a symbol of female autonomy and power.
More about Andy Warhol
American artist, printmaker, and filmmaker. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1949 and began his career as an art director for the magazines Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. His success in the advertising industry led to the Art Directors Club Medal in 1957.
Warhol is considered one of the leading figures of Pop Art. His artistic practice consists largely of portraits, often of well-known individuals, executed in silkscreen technique. He also worked with reproduced documentary images as well as installations in which everyday consumer objects, such as packaging, were given a central role. The underlying idea was that beauty and energy can be found everywhere in modern society, even in things often regarded as banal. As a result, detergent boxes and soup cans became artistic motifs. Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes were transformed through his work into some of the most iconic artworks of the 20th century.
From 1963 onward, he produced and participated in a large number of films in his own studio, The Factory, which simultaneously developed into an important meeting place for New York’s artistic and bohemian scene. Warhol continuously documented his surroundings with a film camera and later also a Polaroid camera. In his so-called Screen Tests, he filmed a number of internationally known figures, including Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dalí. According to his will, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established in New York in 1987, and in 1994 The Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh.
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