Maha Warhol
Maharishi and Andy Warhol come together once more for Autumn / Winter 2022 to present several bodies of his iconic work, intertwined with posthumously collaborated Tigerstripe variants celebrating the Year of the Tiger.

The collection explores contemporary mediums, as well as the many ways as to how art is conceived today.

Warhol’s ‘Dollar Sign’ materialised in a series of screenprints in '82 which first showed at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Toying with the zeitgeist, Warhol was the first to openly comment on the commodification of art unlike many generations of artists who preceded him.

An iconic symbol appropriated to embody the popular culture, mass media and communication of this era, it is interpreted once more and seen on iconic military silhouettes, hand-machined as an artwork on an M65 Jacket as well as Original Snopants® delving deeper in order to explore a connection between the two.

The mid 80s saw Warhol create an important (and one of the last) set of paintings comprised of large and small-scale silkscreens taken from advertisements, newspapers and magazines, ‘Ads and Illustrations’ completed in 1985-86 and uncommonly seen in full until a 2002 show at Gagosian’s London and 24th Street gallery in downtown New York.

The rare series is seen on a set of T-Shirts referencing specific works that comment on war propaganda, diagrams and maps which express an uncanny resonance today - the artworks feature a quiet Maharishi flip to obscure and create a new message surrounding peace and pacifism associated with these works.

'Death and Disaster’ is known to be one of Warhol’s most profound series’ beginning in '62. Warhol had curated and abstracted several newspaper cuttings, which depicted tragedies across the United States where the country saw a large number of suicides, executions, and crashes the images were then silkscreened to a large-scale on canvas using different colours of acrylics and industrial polymers.

Employing the technique of repetition in order to evoke and emphasise the subject to the viewer, one specific work from this series ‘Twelve Electric Chairs' 1964 is seen on an organic cotton hooded sweat and T-Shirts which has also been silkscreened to create triptychs that pay homage to the original images but bear a stark contrast, as it is layered with Maharishi’s DPM: Bonsai Forest. The iconic house pattern which detach camouflages associations to war, and reminds us of its peaceful origins through growing bonsai trees and heavenly clouds.

One of Warhol’s most famed and final painting series ‘The Last Supper’ (1984 - 1986), which saw the artist exhaust variation over the span of 100 different renditions of artworks of Leonardo’s original. Innovating and utilising the industrial processes available to artists at the time. The Renaissance masterpiece was transformed into a pop culture artefact as Warhol combined commercial logos and advertising of the time with the painting.

Maharishi breathes new life into this particular artwork by adding to the lineage of the series, DPM: Pop Golden Tigerskins Series 3 printed on a skate deck set in Aged Woodland as well as a secondary Warhol Magenta - creating a composition which imagines the artist’s work if it were to continue to the point of a contemporary medium today.

The limited collection is available online, as well as in stores Maharishi London and New York.