Trucks Series will be on view at Christie’s headquarters in London from 17 to 28 September 2021.
Andy Warhol’s Trucks Series (1985, estimate: £50,000-70,000) will be offered as a leading highlight of Christie’s Prints & Multiples Online-Only Sale, which is live for bidding from 16-28 September 2021. In June 1986, the German Federal Road Haulage Association (BDF) hosted the 20th World Congress of the International Road Transport Union (IRU) in Frankfurt am Main.
It was for this occasion that the BDF commissioned Andy Warhol to produce a set of screenprints depicting a cargo truck. The German art dealer Hermann Wünsche was the co-publisher, having been one of the first gallerists to bring Andy Warhol’s work to Germany. In 1976 he had arranged for Warhol to make a portrait of Willy Brandt, Germany’s first Social-Democratic Chancellor after the war, and went on to commission portraits of other prominent Germans, such as the president of the Cancer Society, Mildred Scheel (1980), and the goalkeeper of the National football team, Toni Schumacher (1983). Trucks Series will be on view at Christie’s headquarters in London as part of the pre-sale exhibition from 17 to 28 September 2021.
The subject was very much in line with Warhol’s practice to work with everyday objects and images, such as soup cans, washing powder boxes, advertising posters, and iconic figures, real or fictional. The image of a cargo truck combined a certain quotidian blandness with charisma and visual force. After some experimentation with the lines and colours, Warhol and the publishers produced a set of four prints in different colour combinations, with backgrounds in yellow, blue, red and black.
These were printed in an edition of sixty impressions respectively, plus a small number of proofs and 15 hours-commerce impressions. The distribution was shared between Hermann Wünsche, the Federal Road Haulage Association and the International Road Transport Union. The set is offered in the Prints & Multiples sale in September originates from the archive of the Federal Road Haulage Association, today Bundesverband Güterkraftverkehr Logistik und Entsorgung (BGL).
