Warhol’s Oxidation paintings
Skarstedt’s exhibition of Andy Warhol’s “Oxidation Paintings” offers a focused study of one of the artist’s most provocative series. Created between 1977 and 1978, these works exemplify a recent trend in examining specific aspects of Warhol’s diverse practice, following exhibitions such as the Brooklyn Museum’s exploration of his Catholic influences and Galerie Gmurzynska’s examination of his collaboration with Ronnie Cutrone.
The process
As explained here, the exhibition features ten small works, several medium-sized canvases, and one monumental piece measuring 78 by 204 inches. Warhol’s technique involved coating canvas with metallic powders—copper, copper alloys, and gold mixed with acrylic—then exposing the wet surface to urine. The resulting chemical reactions produced striking variations in color and texture, with teals, greens, burgundies, browns, and blacks emerging depending on the metals used and the urinators’ vitamin levels.
Cutrone, Warhol’s primary collaborator on the series, consumed vitamin B complex to achieve particular rust-copper tones. The Factory (Andy Warhol’s studio and creative headquarters in New York City) employed various methods: direct urination, pouring from containers, and, briefly, brushing the urine across the canvas. The results showcase serpentine streams, droplet patterns, and shimmering pools of malachite and turquoise against burnished golden fields.
Interpretation and context
Art historians have offered multiple readings of these works. Rosalind Krauss and others view them as parody—a sardonic commentary on Abstract Expressionism that deflates Jackson Pollock’s mythos by replacing the solitary artist’s gestures with collaborative urination. Warhol himself highlighted this aspect, noting that female collaborators had “no brush stroke,” suggesting he preferred male participants for their more dramatic effects.
Yet this satirical interpretation risks oversimplifying Warhol’s genuine engagement with abstraction. Throughout his career, Warhol demonstrated a fascination with how abstract patterns could reference tangible processes. His early footprint paintings from 1961-62 captured pedestrian traffic on white canvas. In the Oxidation series, he similarly preserved bodily gestures through chemical reaction, creating what might be called indexed abstractions—works that remain anchored to their physical origins even as they achieve visual autonomy.
The paintings also reflect influences from Byzantine iconography (the golden backgrounds echo Russian icons from Warhol’s childhood church) and the voyeuristic dimensions of 1970s Manhattan gay culture. Cutrone described inviting multiple men to urinate against canvases propped vertically like bathroom walls, evoking the transgressive atmosphere of clubs where such activities occurred. Warhol acknowledged that Dalí’s comparison to a urination scene in Pasolini’s Teorema was apt, suggesting the film influenced his revival of the concept.
Aesthetic achievement
The works possess an undeniable visual appeal. Their luminous surfaces, textural complexity, and complementary color relationships create genuinely beautiful compositions. However, their power derives from the interplay between formal qualities and contextual knowledge. Stripped of their provocative creation story and art historical commentary, these abstractions would lose much of their fascination.
The Skarstedt exhibition succeeds in presenting the series as a coherent body of work while providing the necessary biographical and methodological context for full appreciation. The paintings demand to be taken seriously, not despite their perverse origins, but because those origins are integral to their meaning—a fusion of aesthetic beauty, conceptual provocation, and cultural critique that exemplifies Warhol’s singular approach to art-making.