LONDON///ART & COMMERCE///ANDY WARHOL x MAHARISHI CIRCA 1986…

January 16th, 2008

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Andy’s hardly aged a day since 1986…

We’ve got to hand it to UK fashion house MAHARISHI’s founder and military camouflage expert HARDY BLECHMAN for putting together one of the smartest brand collaborations in some time. Digging into the ANDY WARHOL archives for this self-portrait from his late period camouflage series, Blechman perfectly matched the M.O. of his military-themed streetwear brand with one of Pop’s most interesting and unexpected images. Created the year before Warhol’s death in 1987 the camouflage series represented a brief and brilliant outburst of thought and abstract contemplation in the artist’s intensely representational work that saw him repeating different random patterns in a series of ironically colored silkscreen on canvas prints, and overlaying the patters on figurative images such as his “Last Supper” painting and the self-portrait used in Maharishi’s clothing collab. While it might seem unsurprising now, liberating the Disruptive Pattern Material (as camouflage is known in military speak) from its combative connotations in his work, the Pop master shocked his followers with his then radical thinking, and inadvertently influenced a generation of artists & designers to come. HAVE A LOOK:

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Self-Portrait, 1986…

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Untitled Pattern, 1986…

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The Last Supper, 1986…

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Untitled Pattern, 1986…

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Massive untitled silkscreen on display in the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh…

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