A shock of magenta, red, yellow, black and grey, Andy Warhol’s Skull exemplifies one of the artist’s most impactful series from the 1970s. A Vanitas for the Pop era, the stark form of the skull stands out as a void against the vibrant patchwork of colours, its shadow dissolving its presence with and eeriness befitting of the subject.

The Skull paintings were based on a set of photographs taken by Warhol’s studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone, who, on the artist’s instructions, took several photos while adjusting the position of the light source to cast a variety of dramatic shadows. The resultant screen-print of the motif, imposed on hand-painted acrylic, is at once arresting and almost playful, seemingly grinning at its fate.

The blatant vivacity of the colours in this example offers a wry contrast with the subject matter; this momento mori, so common in the history of Western painting, is presented with a Pop aesthetic that seems so conflicting with the sombre undertones of the fragility of life. Perhaps, however, Warhol’s message is instead enhanced by his instantly recognisable style – Pop art, after all, revolves around the instantaneous, the universal and the ephemeral, which here translates into a reminder of the transience of our own existence.

While Warhol had long treated subjects concerned with death – including the electric chair, car crashes and race riots of the 1960s – his Skulls were the most direct and personal exploration of this theme. Some have suggested that after his attempted assassination in 1968 by Valerie Solanas, Warhol became acutely aware of his own mortality, and that the Skull paintings were an introspective reflection upon this. While this might be the case, the immediacy of this work speaks to a universal human fear and inevitability. As his assistant Cutrone once observed, to paint a skull ‘is to paint the portrait of everybody in the world’ (R. Cutrone, quoted in H. Foster, ‘Death in America’, in A. Michelson (ed.), October Files: Andy Warhol, Cambridge, 2001, p. 79).