Andy Warhol

"Warhol's early drawings are characterized by a stylized reductivism or mannered simplicity that manages, like the artist's infrequent but affected speech, to say more in its special manner of saying less. In addition to their spare, magical, frequently uncanny otherworldliness, the one characteristic that most distinguished Warhol's early drawings from his peers' was the use of the blotted line technique," writes Todd Alden in his introduction to this focused volume. Strange World: Drawings 1948-1959includes an eclectic collection of Warhol's blotted-line drawings, created between 1948 and 1959. These works illustrate Warhol's preference for the deliberately incomplete or unresolved image and often feature unpredictable trajectories of color. A familiar cast from Warhol's commercial art and illustrated books--friends, lovers, small children and the anonymous faces of office workers--are presented in concert with charged paper surfaces.