A seminal work from Andy Warhol’s controversial Death and Disaster series will lead Christie’s marquee 20th-century art evening sale on 12 May. The monumental Big Electric Chair (1967-68), with its pink-tinted surface bearing the stark silhouette of Sing Sing’s execution chamber, carries a confidential estimate understood to be around $30 million – a figure that could establish a new benchmark for this series.
The painting’s impeccable provenance traces to visionary Belgian collectors Roger Matthys and Hilda Colle, who acquired it following its 1968 debut in Warhol’s career-defining Stockholm retrospective at Moderna Museet. As pioneering supporters of avant-garde art in postwar Europe, the neuropsychiatrist and his wife assembled what Christie’s specialist Peter van der Graaf describes as “one of the most intellectually rigorous collections of its generation,” with particular strength in American Pop and European conceptual art.
This particular electric chair stands apart within Warhol’s sequence of fourteen variations, measuring six feet across, unlike the multicoloured versions that fetched $ 20.4 million at Sotheby’s.
This example presents the lethal apparatus in uncompromising black against an atmospheric monochrome ground – a visual distillation of what Warhol termed “the nothingness behind everything.”
The work’s exhibition history reveals its conceptual depth. Shown in Pontus Hultén’s groundbreaking Stockholm survey that explored Warhol’s obsession with seriality – displayed alongside Marilyn multiples, Brillo boxes, and Empire State Building film loops – it exemplifies what scholar Natalie Dupêcher identifies as Warhol’s paradox: “The force of repetition rendered the scenes at once banal and more emphatically traumatic.”
As auction houses navigate post-pandemic economic headwinds – the recent UBS/Art Basel report noted a 20% contraction in auction values last year – this consignment tests the resilience of the blue-chip market. At the same time, Warhol’s auction zenith remains the $195 million “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn”; his darker meditations on mortality are commanding increasing critical and commercial attention.
Christie’s chairman, Alex Rotter, positions the work as “the ultimate modern still life,” connecting Warhol’s mechanised imagery to art historical traditions from Dutch vanitas painting to Cézanne. This thematic richness, combined with its exhibition pedigree and the Matthys-Colle collection’s prestige, makes it a bellwether for the spring season.
The sale also represents a full-circle moment for the painting, which had spent years on loan at Ghent’s SMAK museum – an institution that Matthys championed in its founding in 1957. The painting will go under the hammer at Rockefeller Centre; all eyes will be on whether this charged symbol of America’s complex relationship with justice can jolt the market back to life.