Double Elvis

Double Elvis is one of the defining works of Andy Warhol's celebrity portrait practice and a landmark of American Pop Art. Created in 1963, the piece reproduces a publicity still of Elvis Presley in a gunslinger pose from the 1960 Western film Flaming Star, printed twice in overlapping registration on a silver-painted canvas. The deliberate misalignment of the two figures creates a cinematic strobe effect, as though the King of Rock and Roll were caught mid-draw in a flickering projection.

Warhol produced the Elvis canvases for his September 1963 exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, shipping a continuous roll of silkscreened canvas and stretcher bars of various sizes for the gallery to cut and assemble. This factory-line approach was itself the point: celebrity, Warhol suggested, was an industrial product, endlessly reproducible and fundamentally hollow. The silver ground evokes a movie screen, while the doubled image implies that one Elvis is never enough — and yet that multiplication drains rather than intensifies the star's presence.

Of the twenty-two canvases in the Elvis series featuring two figures, the version held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York is among the most widely exhibited and reproduced.