Andy Warhol: Oxidation Paintings
Skarstedt Gallery (Chelsea, NYC)
May 1 – June 28, 2025
Images courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery
In 1978, Andy Warhol began pouring, splattering, and brushing urine—his own and others’—onto copper-coated canvases. The results, now on view at Skarstedt’s East 79th Street gallery in Andy Warhol: Oxidation Paintings, shimmer with irony and acidic beauty. Though often overlooked in favor of his celebrity-driven silkscreens, the Oxidation series marks one of Warhol’s most conceptually daring and materially irreverent moves. The show, the gallery’s first solo revisitation since 2014, offers a timely reappraisal of a body of work that still unnerves, seduces, and redefines the boundaries of painting.
If Warhol’s earlier canvases were rooted in repetition and mechanical coolness, the Oxidation Paintings are tactile and volatile, brimming with bodily implication. Gone are the soup cans and screen-printed icons. In their place: copper metallic grounds chemically altered by human excretion. As the gallery notes, Warhol’s methods in this series “mimic the bravura of Pollock’s drip while stripping it of its mythos.” This particular piece appears to have been subjected to both direct application and more indirect pooling, producing a spectral choreography of stains and blooms. The chemical reactions—literal oxidation triggered by uric acid—become brushstrokes by other means. It’s a satire of Abstract Expressionism’s machismo, and simultaneously, a deeply sincere engagement with the possibilities of matter transformed.
Created in the wake of Warhol’s Sex Parts, Torsos, and Piss paintings, the Oxidation series resonates with the energies of 1970s New York, when the artist moved in and out of gay clubs, punk basements, and Studio 54. There is a decadent honesty in the work’s mechanics—bodily waste made luminous, private acts rendered public. Each painting becomes a kind of involuntary portrait, inscribed with traces of whoever contributed to its making. As Skarstedt points out, the very material—urine—“makes these paintings involuntary portraits: of Warhol, of his assistants, of friends and anonymous strangers.”
Stretching more than 17 feet across, Andy Warhol’s Oxidation (1977–78) is less a painting than a scorched landscape of excess, alchemy, and irreverent performance. Made by applying urine—Warhol’s own and that of his collaborators—onto gold-painted linen, the piece stages a lush theater of corrosion. Acidic greens and burnt umbers unfurl across the monumental surface in bleeding verticals and blooming voids, evoking both the bodily and the celestial. There’s a sense of movement here, as if a ghostly forest is flickering in and out of visibility, or as if Pollock’s all-over gesture has been digested and expelled. The central section bears a burst-like formation, recalling a floral cross or Rorschach blot, suggesting both sacred iconography and abstracted flesh. The oxidation process has etched its own logic into the surface—chemical, unpredictable, and hauntingly beautiful. What might read as abjection becomes transcendence. As in so much of Warhol’s best work, the grotesque and the divine remain inseparable, suspended in gold.
And perhaps that’s the paradox at the heart of the Oxidation Paintings. They are both ritual and rejection, parody and praise. Warhol stages painting as a performance of waste and transformation—less about the mark of genius and more about the messy process of becoming. With this series, Warhol peels away his factory sheen and reveals himself as a painter of unpredictable intimacy, whose surfaces—like the one hauntingly on view at Skarstedt—refuse to settle into a singular meaning. They corrode, shimmer, and insist on being looked at, even when we’d rather look away.