Sebi Schager (AT) – If Warhol Knew (Rosé)

Sebi works across spray stencils, robotic pen drawing, gold leaf, and digital collage — his practice moves between appropriation and reinvention, art-historical imagery taken apart, digitally recombined, then brought back into physical form. His stencil work follows a mono-stencil approach: a single, highly complex halftone mask carries the entire image definition — no layering, no registration. Beneath it, a carefully composed underpainting sets the colour field. The bridges that hold the stencil together become a stylistic signature, and every spray pass is final. Each piece is hand-sprayed onto archival paper, making every piece in the small edition a unique original.

If Warhol Knew appropriates Andy Warhol's 1976 Skull series — one of Pop Art's most iconic confrontations with mortality, made in the years following the 1968 assassination attempt on Warhol's life — and adds a single element: a face mask. The intervention is minimal but precise, collapsing the distance between Warhol's memento mori and the collective experience of a pandemic. Warhol's own signature is part of the stencil; when the edition is signed, one name crosses the other — not theft, but a deliberate act of appropriation, knowingly taking and reworking. Hand-painted stencil with spraypaint on lightfast Fabriano Tiziano — the pop-art palette preserved while pushing appropriation one generation further. Each color combination is limited to 10.

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About the artist