Saint Apollonia (complete set)

Warhol produced the Saint Apollonia series in 1984 as part of a broader engagement with religious iconography that ran through his later practice. Drawn to the visual language of Catholic devotional imagery — halos, saints, votive figures — Warhol found in these subjects the same quality of intense, stylised, repeated representation that had interested him in celebrity portraiture. The saint and the star occupied the same formal territory.

Apollonia of Alexandria was martyred in the third century; her attribute is a pair of dental forceps, referencing the torture inflicted before her death. Warhol renders her as a standing figure holding forceps and palm frond, the composition based on devotional imagery with the source unmistakable. The craquelure texture that runs across all four prints introduces the visual appearance of age, as though the image had been extracted from a damaged painting or a cracked fresco — an effect that frames the contemporary screenprint within centuries of devotional tradition.

The four colourways — red, black, tan, and gold — follow the Pop logic of serial colour variation, each print asking how the same devotional image reads differently when the ground shifts from monumental red to sombre black to warm gold. The signed edition of 250 per print makes the complete set a more selective acquisition than individual works from the series.