{"id":2445556,"date":"2019-06-20T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=308159"},"modified":"2019-06-20T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T22:00:00","slug":"ryan-mcginness-channels-andy-warhols-flower-power-in-aspen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/ryan-mcginness-channels-andy-warhols-flower-power-in-aspen\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan McGinness channels Andy Warhol\u2019s flower power in Aspen"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Ryan McGinness, “Warhol Flower Icon,” 2019. Hundreds of works from the artist’s series are now on display at the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen.<\/strong>
Courtesy photo<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Located on Centre Street in downtown Manhattan, across from a very active Buddhist temple, on a transitional block between Chinatown and the still super-chic south SoHo, sits the studio loft of artist Ryan McGinness where we met last May. He was finishing photographing his latest series, \u201cWarhol Flower Icons,\u201d all 459 canvases of which go on display at the Baldwin Gallery tonight.<\/p>\n

As the title implies, McGinness\u2019 flowers are an interpretation of Andy Warhol\u2019s \u201cFlower\u201d paintings, which he debuted at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1964. Fifty-five years ago, the subject matter was a radical departure for Warhol. Until then it had been Campbell\u2019s and Coca-Cola (household famous), Marilyn Monroe (celebrity famous) and mug shots of criminals (notoriously famous). This new subject matter was not famous, rather the opposite: generic blossoms, although politically charged \u2014 \u201cflower power\u201d and such.<\/p>\n

Today, Warhol\u2019s flowers have faded into the background scenery of the Warhol oeuvre, but the more McGinness reinvestigated the series, the more he realized how largely misunderstood they have become.<\/p>\n

\u201c(The flowers) are arguably his largest body of work,\u201d McGinness explained. \u201cThey rival the portraits. He made over 900, all different sizes, from 5 inches up to 10 feet.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s part one. Part two is that, \u201cYes, everyone knows it\u2019s based on the one photo of hibiscus blossoms by Patricia Caulfield published in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography. But what people don\u2019t realize is that it\u2019s not a photo of flowers that\u2019s being reproduced. It\u2019s a hand holding an image of a photo of the flowers accompanying an article about Kodak\u2019s latest chemical imaging processor. So it\u2019s an image of an image about process and technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, there is one more level at work here. McGinness continued: \u201cFurthermore, once he had cut the original material and recomposed it into a square, then finessed the stamens, then made photo copies, and then photo copies of photo copies of photo copies in order to increase the contrast, what he ended up with, what he wanted to make, was not a flower, but a symbol of a flower \u2026 and making an image into a symbol by flattening it down. That\u2019s close to my heart. That\u2019s what I do with my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGinness has been a longtime fan of Warhol and the parallels in their work have been pointed out for about as long as he has been making art.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up loving Warhol,\u201d he explained. \u201cI lived with a poster of a grid of Coke bottles in my bedroom when I was in junior high school. I remember where I was when he died. I went to Carnegie Mellon because that\u2019s where Andy went. \u2026 Well, also because it\u2019s a great school.\u201d<\/p>\n

When McGinness was a senior at Mellon, he also helped open the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh before scooting off to New York City to create his unique visual style which blends a pure kind of communication design with a subversive, sometimes psychedelic, sometimes sexualized iconography.<\/p>\n

For his take on the Warhol flowers, he \u201cdecided to do this in the spirit of artists doing other artists\u2019 work. These are flowers after flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGinness walked me over to a 6-inch stack of drawings to illustrate his rigorous deconstruction \u2014 to the studs, as they say. He started with the photograph mechanical rather than the painting, then kept reducing and reducing until he had four circles and a square. The grass became a grid. From there, he added the details back in. Drawing upon drawing upon drawing until he found his take.<\/p>\n

From there he devised a set of rules via a series of 50 test paintings: One design within a color palette range and then the compositional components \u2014 grass, pedals, background \u2014 became the manipulated variables. Throw in a rotation and the \u201csolutions,\u201d as he likes to call them, are infinite.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy for the genius of Warhol to get lost in plain sight. His preternatural insights into 20th (and now 21st) century mass culture were so prescient, his images of icons now so iconic, his influence on contemporary art so vast, it\u2019s as if he\u2019s gone molecular, and thus invisible, something that would have pleased him greatly. Nonetheless, through McGinness\u2019 meticulous reimagination, Andy\u2019s flower power lives on.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryan McGinness, “Warhol Flower Icon,” 2019. Hundreds of works from the artist’s series are now on display at the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen.Courtesy photo Located on Centre Street in downtown Manhattan, across from a very active Buddhist temple, on a transitional block between Chinatown and the still super-chic south SoHo, sits the studio loft of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2445556","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-20 01:22:43","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2445556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2445556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2445556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2445556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}