NEW YORK, NY.- The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné announced a call for works for Volume 7: Paintings, late 1979-1981, now in preparation. To be published by Phaidon Press in three slip-cased books, Volume 7 is the first of five projected volumes dedicated to the artist’s paintings and sculptures of the 1980s. It will document nearly 1,000 works of art produced by Warhol during the first two years of the 1980s.

Owners of paintings, sculptures, and drawings are invited to contact the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné by sending us an email at catalogue@warholfoundation.org, or by submitting an owner questionnaire on our website.

“As the Catalogue Raisonné launches its research into the 1980s, Warhol never fails to surprise us, defying conventional wisdom and received ideas,” observes Neil Printz, editor of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné since 1993. “During the last decade of his life—seven prolific years that were cut short by his untimely death on February 22, 1987—Warhol produced more paintings than in the 1960s and 1970s combined. In the fourth decade of his celebrated career, Warhol’s artistic intelligence and virtuosity is at its height, and he ineluctably moves into the center of a core group of artists—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Julian Schnabel—who, with him, will come to define what it means to be an artist in New York in the 1980s.”

Volume 7 opens with the historic encounter between Warhol and the charismatic German artist Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf on May 18, 1979, with Chapter 1 documenting the series of portraits that Warhol did of Beuys soon thereafter. In many ways, the Joseph Beuys portrait series bridges certain techniques and pictorial concerns that first arose in the late 1970s—namely, the opticality of diamond dust, reversal effects, and seriality—with key series of the early 1980s, especially the Diamond Dust Shoes and Dollar Signs, recorded in Chapters 4 and 8. Notably, Warhol mobilizes these processes to radically reconfigure subjects and themes from the 1950s and early 1960s long associated with him and his work.

Strikingly, nearly half of the 1,000 paintings featured in Volume 7 are portraits, including the more than 280 portraits of 100 sitters commissioned by an international roster of dealers, like Thomas Ammann, Bruno Bischofberger, Bernd Klüser, and Hans Mayer. The number of commissioned portraits that Warhol painted in 1980, documented in Chapters 3 and 7, surpasses by two-fold his peak years during the 1970s. Among the celebrities who sat for Warhol in 1980 are Debbie Harry, Gianni Versace, and Sylvester Stallone.

Chapters 2 and 6 feature two series, Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century and Myths, that introduce a new modality of thematic subject matter into Warhol’s portrait practice. The latter series includes Warhol’s self-portrait as “The Shadow,” the shape-shifting radio star of his childhood. Commissioned by Ronald Feldman, the two series mark the growing importance of printmaking, collage, and drawing in Warhol’s painting process. In both series, printmaking techniques, especially gradient color printing, also known as the “rainbow roll,” became integrated into his paintings, revealing the increasing liminality between Warhol’s painting studio and the printmaking studio of his proprietary printer, Rupert Jasen Smith.

“Warhol was an unparalleled master of line,” continues Printz. “This is evident in the virtuosity of the line drawings he produced during the 1950s and early 1960s. After a lapse of ten years, when he virtually stopped drawing, Warhol began to draw again in 1972. In 1980, with the Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century, Warhol mobilizes drawing for the first time into his painting process in a major series. The silkscreens in his 1981 Dollar Sign series, for example, are almost entirely based upon a set of drawings in which he brilliantly improvised upon the most rudimentary of signs, composed of one or two vertical strokes that cross an ‘S’ shape. From these drawings, Warhol generated the variations that make up a multicolored series consisting of approximately 275 paintings. This is indicative of the new instrumentality that drawing takes on in Warhol’s painting during the 1980s.”

Chapters 5 and 7 of this new volume record smaller series and projects from this time. Diamond Dust Candy Boxes and Diamond Dust Hearts, two series of dedicated gift paintings that are documented in Chapter 5, build on a gift-giving practice that began with the 1978 Studio 54 paintings. Chapter 7 features several commissions from 1980-81: a series of paintings of seven architectural wonders of the German-speaking world, commissioned by Hermann Wünsche; and Fate Presto, three paintings commissioned by Lucio Amelio for the Terrae Motus collection that commemorate the tragedy of the Irpinia earthquake near Naples on November 23, 1980.