Skarstedt New York is pleased to announce Silkscreen Paintings: Prince, Warhol, Wool, an exhibition examining how these three pivotal American artists transformed the commercial printing technique of silkscreen into a vehicle for critical commentary on mass media, appropriation, and the materiality of painting itself. Opening on March 5, 2026, at the gallery's Upper East Side location, the exhibition brings together major works from the 1970s through the 1990s, revealing how each painter harnessed the mechanical reproducibility of silkscreen to challenge painting's conventions while paradoxically reasserting the artist's hand within an ostensibly mechanical process.
Borrowed from commercial advertising and industrial production, the silkscreen process offered these artists a method that seemed to bypass traditional painterly gesture in favor of mechanical reproduction. Yet what emerges is a more complex relationship between the mechanical and the handmade. Through strategic layering, controlled accidents, and painterly flourishes, each artist retained their distinctive presence within work made by a fundamentally reproducible process. All three practiced forms of appropriation: Prince borrowed jokes and cartoons from mass culture, Warhol elevated everyday symbols and objects, and Wool raided both clip art and his own archive. Silkscreen became the perfect vehicle for this recycling of imagery, allowing endless recombination while interrogating questions of authenticity, authorship, and originality that would define late twentieth-century art.
Andy Warhol famously declared his desire to work like a machine, and silkscreen provided the perfect vehicle for collapsing the distance between artistic production and industrial manufacturing. Works on view, such as Knives (1981-82), Hammer and Sickle (1976), and Reflection, from the Zeitgeist series (1983) reveal silkscreen not as a means of achieving uniformity but as a method for multiplying difference. Warhol deliberately preserved imperfections such as visible ground bleeding through forms, registration shifts, and uneven inking as evidence of chance operations transforming each impression into a unique object. In the Hammer and Sickle and Knives series, communist and violent symbols become subjects for formal experimentation through a severely reduced palette, evacuating their ideological content while amplifying their power as pure design. Warhol's achievement was to demonstrate that this doesn't eliminate the aura of the unique artwork but rather relocates it within the unpredictable space between intention and execution, establishing the fundamental terms through which subsequent artists would negotiate questions of authenticity and painting's relevance in an image-saturated world.
Similarly, the question of authorship lies at the conceptual heart of Richard Prince's White Paintings. In works such as Lady Doc II (1992), Spy vs. Spy (1991), and Unaware of Being Despair (1994), Prince orchestrates what Nancy Spector describes as an “evocative scrambling of signifiers.” By extracting jokes from humor columns and pairing them with fragmentary cartoon imagery, Prince denies viewers the clarifying foundations of meaning and attribution. These silkscreened appropriations float in fields of white paint alongside blurry photographs and graffiti-like texts, creating a transgressive perversity that brings to the surface the hostility and shame fueling American humor. Yet Prince's hand reveals itself through calculated painterly interventions: a brush of white paint running over printed text, intentional slippages, glitches producing ghostly doublings. What emerges is painting on the edge of oblivion, seductively disorienting in its collapse of high and low, nostalgia and critique.
Simultaneously, Christopher Wool abandoned his signature rollers in favor of silkscreen in the mid-1990s, inaugurating a decisive shift from reduction to layering. In works such as Give It Up or Turn It Loose (1994) and the Untitled canvases from 1997 and 2004, Wool deploys silkscreen in increasingly complex acts of self-cannibalization. He initially extracted generic floral motifs from clip art and layered black screenings over one another in dense accumulations. The introduction of white overpainting transformed the process into something simultaneously additive and reductive, producing gritty, seemingly uncontrolled surfaces marked by the sooty traces of screen frames and deliberate misregistrations. By 1998, Wool began using his own finished paintings as source material, photographing them, generating new silkscreens, and transferring the images to fresh canvases with strategic misalignments or subsequent acts of painterly vandalism. This strategy of solipsistic replication raises provocative questions: Are these second-generation abstractions representational works depicting paintings that already exist as objects in the world? Wool's practice suggests that a painting of a painting remains irreducibly a painting, with no operative hierarchy between original and copy. Process and subject work in tandem throughout, the visible apparatus of reproduction becoming both evidence of method and subject unto itself, affirming painting's resilience when reduced to pure reflexivity.
Together, these bodies of work reveal silkscreen as a versatile tool for navigating questions central to late twentieth-century painting: the status of the unique object in an age of mechanical reproduction, the persistence of authorship within appropriation, and painting's continued vitality when stripped of traditional markers of authenticity.