Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair (1971) returns to one of the most haunting images of his career. Warhol first took up the subject in 1963 within his Death and Disaster series, which examined how repetition in the media dulls the impact of death. “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again,” he said, “it doesn’t really have any effect.” In 1971 he revisited the image for a portfolio of ten screenprints, cropping closer on the chair.

The source was a 1953 press photograph of the death chamber at Sing Sing prison, released the year Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed there for conspiracy to commit espionage. Warhol renders the empty chair in deep crimson and magenta, then sweeps the rest of the sheet with printed brushstrokes of orange, yellow and pink. The warm, almost pretty palette sits uneasily against the subject, and with no one in the room, the scene turns cold and mechanical.

Warhol often drew on press photographs; lifting this one out of its journalistic context makes viewers look again at an image they might pass over. Electric Chair prints are held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim. This impression, number 160 from the edition of 250, was published by Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich.