Red Elvis

3 Pages 632 Words

Andy Warhol’s, Red Elvis (1962) uses a silkscreen process to replicate a commercial photograph of Elvis Presley onto a large painted canvas. I will provide an analysis of the unique image; as well as the method in which it was produced. I will also provide a brief explanation as to how I related and interpreted my image from the Red Elvis image.
Red Elvis is a large, photo-silkscreen image that is emblazed by 36 exact duplicates of a headshot of the musician Elvis Presley. The headshots are in solid black ink on a solid red background, and it measures 175cm by 132 cm. (Rosenblum, 598, 1989). The contrast between the black and the red delivers a visual shock for what is in all essences an uninteresting photograph of Elvis Presley. This “shock of the new” (Collacello, 28) was evidently what Warhol was trying to accomplish.
Due to the process in which the photo is transferred over to a silkscreen, much of the photo’s detail is lost, giving the final image an artificial, almost abstract, appearance on the canvas. We know that the image is of Elvis Presley, but if the image was of someone else, would we recognize the image as being a face? The intensity of the black heads does shift slightly, becoming slightly more intense, or darker, near the bottom. This effect gives the artwork a publicity poster-like feel, a slight deviance from the original being multiplied over a large space.
The photograph of Elvis loses much of its uniqueness and glamorous qualities when the photo is multiplied several times over. Each image is closely aligned to one another to form a grid so that you are no longer looking at just 1 photo of Elvis, but an entire wall of 36 Elvis’s. The individuality of a single photograph is lost to this effect of duplication. The entire artwork is quite large, meaning each Elvis head was either kept to the original size, or enlarged. Elvis was chosen as a subject as Warhol had a longtime affinity for th...