Andy Warhol Sex Parts

 Sex Parts is a portfolio of six screenprints self-published by the artist in 1978. These rare works come from a small edition of 30 and were not widely exhibited due to their obviously explicit nature.  

Anecdotally, Sex Parts originated when Warhol was approached by a stranger bragging about his private parts, which Warhol then photographed on his polaroid. As he had previously done for his Ladies and Gentlemen series, the artist then recruited from gay clubs and bath houses to come to his studio and pose for him, except this time his subjects performed sex acts.  

The extremely close angle and focal point of each screenprint is undoubtedly used to shock the viewer, also accentuated by Warhol keeping the images in monochrome. The sex acts are divorced from their enactors, with only their hands and genitals visible. As Warhol elevated the soup can to a status of high art, so here he endeavors to place pornography on even keel and treat arousal as an aesthetic. Rather than imbuing the acts with shame, he relieves the images from their at-first unnerving reaction by way of repetition and seriality, as he often did with violent images. One of Warhol’s core beliefs was that the more one saw an image the more it could desensitise the viewer and ultimately change its perception: ‘I started repeating the same image because I liked the way repetition changed the same image. Also, I felt at the time, as I do now, that people can look at and absorb more than one image at a time.’ 

Within a contemporary reception, one sees Sex Parts as in important work both for its time and within Warhol’s personal life. As a gay man from a Catholic upbringing, Warhol had not produced a work dealing with homosexuality in such an obvious way until this present portfolio. It was only during relatively late in his career - this period of the 70s and 80s, that the artist felt comfortable enough to make such bold statements. Preceding the AIDS crisis by only a few years, Warhol’s exploration of New York City gay culture now forms a canonical part of queer history.