Crash (Andy Warhol)

This poster featuring Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice) (1963) by Andy Warhol was produced in 2010, in conjunction with Crash: Homage to JG Ballard at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London. Taking its title from J. G. Ballard’s visionary 1973 novel, the group exhibition—which followed the writer’s death in 2009—featured works by artists inspired by Ballard’s highly influential dystopian vision, including his contemporaries Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Helmut Newton, and Andy Warhol, as well as selections from younger artists such as Glenn Brown, Tacita Dean, Mike Nelson, and Jenny Saville.

Warhol’s work, one of the first “car crash” paintings from the artist’s Death and Disaster series, combines his interests in the mass media, celebrity, and death in a consciously impersonal image of the gruesome aftermath of an automobile accident. As Warhol scholar Neil Printz has written, “the car crash turns the American dream into a nightmare.”