Shoes is part of the wallpaper collection Flavor Paper produced in collaboration with the Warhol Foundation, with each design offering a new interpretation of the artist’s work. Warhol was passionate about the repetition of pattern and throughout the 1960s he frequently installed his series of screen prints edge to edge to create the look of a wallpaper repeat. Many of his canvases also repeat a single image numerous times across the surface, mimicking the repetitive aspect of wallpaper. Warhol designed a total of five wallpapers over the course of his career, with the first being “Cow” for the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966. None of Warhol’s papers were produced for commercial sale and had only been available for museum installations. All of the Flavor Paper wallpapers are original designs created by Flavor Paper as inspired by articles in the Warhol archive. They are not reprints or reproductions of wallpapers that Warhol designed.
Shoes wallpaper is a fitting tribute to Warhol as women’s shoes played a significant role in the development of his career. One of Warhol’s first magazine jobs was illustrating women’s shoes. A short time later he was freelancing for a local shoe company, and began selling the rejected illustrations at his favorite restaurant hangout. Shoes wallpaper was inspired by a screen print Warhol did in 1980 of a seemingly random clutter of women’s shoes. Warhol created a number of still-life compositions of shoes and captured each with a Polaroid which he used to create his screen prints. Flavor Paper worked with these original Polaroid’s and put the shoe compositions in repeat to create the wallpaper.
