Red Door Diptych (The Electric Chair)

From the late 1970s, Marclay developed the unique technique within a multimedia work of citation with sources ranging from John Cage to manga, and borrowing from pop and punk cultures, and (above all) from the sound universe as he drew on sample and remix techniques. Marclay’s work is located at the intersection of visual art and experimental music.

The Electric Chair, the series to which the work Red Door Diptych belongs, is a set of silkscreens on canvas and paper that echo Andy Warhol’s series Death and Disasters. In that series, the Pop artist used as his model a photograph of an execution room with an empty electric chair in the middle and a door in the background, over which the word “Silence” hangs, similar to the one that asks people to be quiet in recording studios and performance halls. In Red Door Diptych, Marclay has reframed the image by focusing on the door and the sign. He has kept the rectangular shape of the door, which he has shaded in different tones, thereby adopting Warhol’s formal processes, such as enlargement and serial repetition. Marclay's take on this Warholian theme draws our attention to the staging of capital punishment and the social regulation of sound and silence.

The Pinault Collection first showed this work in 2023 at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, as part of the exhibition Forever Sixties.