Though these may not be the most graphically compelling images from the late master’s oeuvre, ANDY WARHOL’s rare diamond dust screenprints currently being exhibited at WOODWARD GALLERY on Manhattan’s LES represent a very unusual and often overlooked moment in his prodigious late-period output. Created in 1979 seemingly as a reaction to the intense figurative content of his nearly endless portrait series begun in the 1960s, Warhol’s “Diamond Dust & Shadows” series takes the artist back to the abstract method he so roundly rejected at the beginning of his career when he sidestepped the burgeoning AbEx movement to nearly single-handedly define the Pop genre. To create the works, Warhol photographed carefully composed shadows in his studio and then silk-screened the resulting abstract compositions onto paper using prodigious amounts of vibrant color and ground diamond dust to create a repetitive series completely outside the parameters of his previous works. Presented for the first time in its entirety, the series is a fascinating, if not dated, look at what might be the first vestige of art as bling. Take that, Mr Hirst…

Andy vs Rambo, 1979…

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