Space Fruit (complete set)

Across the six sheets of Space Fruit, the fruit seems to float rather than rest. In one, four halved cantaloupes, their seeds shown in black, scatter across a lilac ground, each paired with a pale blue shadow. In another, a whole watermelon in dark green lies across a pink and purple base beneath a red block. Three dark red apples hang over a mustard ground with mint-green shadows, whole cantaloupes in orange tumble across blues and turquoise. A heap of peaches spreads over yellow and purple. The last sheet shows pears in green and black, casting a long shadow across hot pink. Each fruit is printed in grainy photographic tone and loosely outlined in black, with the colour blocks set slightly out of register.

The series takes the traditional still life and lifts it off the table, as the title suggests. Made in the same year as Warhol’s Shadows series, it gives as much weight to the shadows as to the fruit itself, so the coloured shapes beside each piece become part of the composition. The result sits between his earlier Pop subjects and the abstraction he was exploring at the end of the 1970s.