Electric chair (Unique), 1978

Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair (Unique), 1978, belongs to the artist’s haunting “Death and Disaster” vocabulary—an image he returned to repeatedly from the mid-1960s onward. Based on a press photograph of the execution chamber at Sing Sing, the composition presents the empty electric chair beneath a stark fluorescent glow, transforming a documentary image into an icon of modern anxiety. In this 1978 unique screenprint on Strathmore drawing paper, Warhol heightens the psychological charge through his use of saturated color and stark contrast, allowing the banality of the room to collide with the gravity of its function. The absence of a human figure is precisely what intensifies the work: the viewer is left alone with the machinery of death, suspended in a moment of eerie stillness.

Measuring 18 × 24 inches (45.7 × 61 cm.), this example is estate stamped and accompanied by a certificate from the Warhol Foundation, underscoring its authenticity and place within the artist’s late practice. By the late 1970s, Warhol was revisiting and recontextualizing earlier motifs, and the Electric Chair image—simultaneously political, clinical, and media-driven—resonated anew in a decade grappling with questions of punishment, spectacle, and power. As a unique impression, this work stands apart from the more widely known editioned versions, offering a singular variation within one of Warhol’s most conceptually charged bodies of work.