S&H Green Stamps - portrait

Rows upon rows of little green coupons fill this canvas, and if you grew up in mid-century America, you would recognize them instantly. These are S&H Green Stamps, the freebies handed out at grocery stores and gas stations back in the 1960s. Shoppers licked them into paper booklets and eventually cashed them in for toasters, lamps, and other household odds and ends. Andy Warhol took this throwaway scrap of everyday life and multiplied it across a grid until it became something worth staring at.

Made in 1965, the piece sits comfortably alongside Warhol's other Pop Art experiments with soup cans, soda bottles, and dollar bills. Repeating the same small stamp again and again, he poked at the machinery of mass production and the odd way our eyes glaze over things we see too often. The colors here drift slightly out of register, and a few printing hiccups show through, which was exactly the kind of imperfection Warhol welcomed in his silkscreen work.

Picking a free supermarket stamp as your subject takes a certain cheeky confidence. Warhol clearly liked mixing the world of bargain-bin consumer goods with the polished space of an art gallery, nudging people to give a second glance to the ordinary bits and pieces cluttering their daily routines.