Committee 2000, 1982

Andy Warhol’s Committee 2000 (1982) sits squarely within the late phase of his career, a period defined by reflection, legacy-building, and an intensified engagement with systems of power, repetition, and mass visibility. By the early 1980s, Warhol was no longer merely chronicling consumer culture; he was actively examining the structures—corporate, political, and institutional—that shape collective identity. Committee 2000 exemplifies this shift. Rendered as a screenprint in colors, the work carries Warhol’s unmistakable visual economy: crisp outlines, mechanical precision, and a surface that feels both impersonal and iconic. The title itself evokes bureaucracy and futurity, suggesting a governing body or abstract authority, while Warhol’s treatment reduces these concepts to visual signals, reinforcing his long-standing fascination with how meaning is manufactured and circulated.

The work was signed in pencil and numbered from an edition of 2000, underscoring Warhol’s deliberate tension between exclusivity and mass production—an idea central to his practice. Measuring 30 x 20 inches (76.4 x 51 cm), Committee 2000 is intimate enough to function as a collectible object, yet conceptually expansive in its ambition. The large edition size reflects Warhol’s democratic approach to art ownership, while the hand-signed element preserves a sense of authorship and authenticity. Today, the piece reads as both a time capsule of early-1980s cultural consciousness and a prescient meditation on institutional power and reproducibility—concerns that remain deeply relevant in an era defined by systems, networks, and image saturation.