Flowers #2 1970

Andy Warhol made this print, Flowers #2, using screen printing. It’s like a repeatable gesture, a democratic mark. The flat, unmodulated colors here feel so detached. Like, they're flowers, but they're also not really flowers, right? It’s like someone saw a flower, and then someone else saw a photograph of the flower, and then Warhol turned that into a painting. It’s a reproduction of a reproduction. There’s a kind of layering, a kind of removal. Look at the pink background – those scratchy marks that evoke the idea of stems. The flower shapes are so clean, with those colors that pop! It's kind of wild. I love how he used a similar approach in his portraits, reducing the image to these bold, graphic shapes and colors. It’s like he's saying, "Hey, we're all just surfaces." And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s beautiful.