Andy Warhol’s “Electric chair” (1967) is an impressing work of art.  The image of the electric chair was primarily used by Warhol in 1964 in the ‘Death and Disaster’ series, a collection of works the creation of which the artist was engaged in from 1962 to 1965. In the first series the representation of the electric chair (Sing-Sing Gaol, New York) was repeated as numerous images. In 1967, in preparation for his exposition at the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Warhol reprocessed the picture for a series of fourteen paintings in diverse color arrangement. There only a single image of the chair was depicted. The version I observe is the one in orange, blue and green colors.

The work is a print (screen-print and acrylic on canvas) of an electric chair. The viewer observes an electric chair situated at the approximate center of a big, bare, somber room with its walls depressingly blank and rough. The room is deserted; it radiates profound silence and emptiness. The artist used bright, rich colors of orange, blue and green, the last one marking the shadows cast by the chair, thickening at the far corner of the room. The combination of tints is harsh, unnatural and unexpected. The artist makes an accent on the chair, surrounding it by dense green shadows, the details of construction being marked out with the use of bright orange.

In the image Warhol brings up a subject of compulsory death. Execution by the electric chair is a legally approved and supposedly civilized killing, yet it is a murder anyway. The picture bears a dispiriting atmosphere of hopelessness, of death and of fear. The picture is extremely disturbing, even bright orange and green colors look discouragingly. It seems like Warhol did his best to make the image stay in the viewer memory for quite a long time. He means not only to illustrate, but also to impress. The visible plainness and minimalism of how the work is organized does not at all simplify the whole meaning of the image. Warhol strives to communicate the true feeling aroused by this terrifying instrument of death. The chair is empty, a feature which serves to take away the human aspect, as well as the mere idea of execution, from the picture. Nevertheless, the artist makes it so that the work conveys the feeling of forthcoming death, as if the convict is waiting somewhere behind those bare walls.

In the observed version of the Chair, Warhol has closed in on the chair itself, with the background being almost totally empty. Providing the viewer with lack of actual details, not allowing observer to see where the chair is, or where the image is from, he consciously reduces its meaning. The picture, though being related to state-controlled execution, provides no clues as to the true essence of the place it depicts.

The image is obviously a successful work of art. Moreover, it’s the one of those Warhol’s works that I like the most. “Warhol is exploring the banality of death in the modern world” (Christie’s). His Electric Chair radiates power and threat. The picture does not simply allude to death. It practically yells at the viewer, as a forceful and persuasive reminder of humans’ mortality. Without application of detailed illustration of the very procedure of execution, it manages to communicate the terrifying nature of the process. It definitely has some sort of social meaning, even though the author did his best to avoid it, depriving the image of any cues to its actual origin.