Somebody Wants to Buy Your Apartment Building

Somebody Wants to Buy Your Apartment Building is a monumental and audacious painting that reflects Andy Warhol’s lifelong fascination with advertising, popular culture and the mass media. Taking as his source image an advertisement that the artist spotted in the classified section of a New York newspaper, its bold simplicity evokes the street-inspired work of Jean-Michael Basquiat whom he befriended in the mid-1980s. After the pair met, Warhol began to develop his own text-based aesthetic based on cheap advertisements for body building programs and apartment sales that filled numerous pages of the city’s tabloid newspapers.

Painted towards the end of his career, these commercial evocations also hark back to his earlier work in which he celebrated the visual aesthetic of Campbell’s Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, paintings which started the Pop Art revolution. Here, the same simple visual language which established Warhol’s career as one of the most innovative artists of his generation stills resonates throughout the epic dimensions of this mural sized work. When asked about this new notion of Pop, Warhol remarked "once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again. The mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting” (P. Hackett, Popism: the Warhol '60s, New York, 1980, pp. 39-40).