There’s also the fact that by strange coincidence, you’re presenting these drawings at a time when our current administration has proposed making all US federal buildings conform to the Neoclassical mold. In his essay for this show’s catalog, artist Paul Chan writes that your art is non-salvific—i.e. it resists “the self-certainty and self-regard that announces authority’s appearance.” Do you consider your work political in nature?

Looking again at your art of the past three decades, I’m struck by how many edges there are in your sculptures and installations—edges that demark zones, edges that create internal forms, edges that appear and disappear depending on the viewer’s position. But although some of these edges might trick the eye or cut into one another, every element in your works always retains its own identity. The layered contours in these drawings, for example, might interfere with one another, but each figure is clearly delineated. It occurs to me that while there are many intersections and overlaps in your works, there are no blurs. True?

Your physical presence is evident in many of these photographs. In some of them, for example, I can see your knees; I can see the book on your studio table; I can see the shadow of your iPhone.

You mean in some of these drawings?

The only works of Warhol’s taken directly from Classical sculpture are his 1982 Alexander the Great series, commissioned by his dealer, Alexander Iolas—also known as Alexander the Great.

You’ve titled this drawing series The Classics, which to me gives it a literary spin—or maybe a musical or fashion-y one. Many critics have noted the persistent use of frames in your work—often nested inside one another and often involving photographs. Are frames like puns? Are puns like frames?

And how much has classical sculpture informed your work? A lot? A little? As much as anything else?

These days I think about how the word “class” is part of The Classics.

Your sculptures, even when as abstract as the Studs, are often not only semi-figurative, but anthropomorphic—they loom, they huddle, they stumble, they proffer and enfold. Sometimes they even wear shoes. And your 2007 photographic series Voyage of the Beagle is a boisterous grouping of found figurative images ranging from a prehistoric menhir to a stuffed polar bear to a kitten printed on a plastic toilet-seat cover.

It’s quite a crowded scene in these works. Why the layering of figures? Are they in conversation?

Italo Calvino wrote: “A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.”

–Anne Doran and Rachel Harrison