Andy Warhol: Late Paintings

Primarily stark black-and-white ad paintings from the mid-1980s, Andy Warhol's Late Paintings , highlight a return to the artist's scrapbooks of ads from the 1950s where hand painted illustrations and lettering add a raw confrontation to the viewer impossible to ignore. The works - which feature images that have been enlarged and screened on black and white canvases - are both brash and icy. Even though the paintings are made by hand, the finished paintings seem totally blank and disembodied.

In fact, the paintings are so emphatically dry in appearance they seem to suggest that, if pushed any farther, they might simply vanish. In short – to mimic one of the slogans – the paintings are just "one breath away" from returning to their abstract essence.

Around the same time, Warhol was making his Camouflage paintings - vivid designs that are really about the notion of making things disappear, and his black and white Rorschach works - inky blotches intended to communicate with "the other world" of our deepest psyche. The black and white ads and illustrations must be considered in the light of Warhol's impulse, as the year of his death drew near, to fiddle with the beyond as it is transmitted to us through the odd cultural phenomena of the human world.