Andy Warhol’s Never Before Seen Works Found On Floppy Disks

An artist’s work lives way past a person’s expiration date, and such is the case for artist Andy Warhol. The artist who has left a huge influence on the art community, has left the world more works that are just now being discovered two decades after his death.

It’s being reported that dozens of Warhol’s works have been found on numerous floppy disks that are dated back to 1985. The work was created two years before the artist died due to a post operative problem following gallbladder surgery.

A team of media artists, computer experts, as well as museum professionals have decided to put together the digital images after the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club took the works from the Amiga disks that were in the famous Pittsburgh museum.

As the story goes, in the mid 80s, a computer manufacturer Commodore International had paid Warhol to show the artistic capabilities that a personal computer has. Now it’s doodling on paint shop pro or the “paint” program, but back then Warhol took the Amiga 1000 and used it to pioneer several pieces of digital art. Iconic images like his Campbell’s soup cans, Botticelli’s Venus and a self portrait was recreated by Warhol to demonstrate the potential artistry one can express on a computer.

During an interview with AmigaWorld, Warhol had this to say about making art on a computer, specifically his Amiga, “Well, I like it because it looks like my work.”

The search for these missing works started when a Brooklyn artist named Cory Arcangel learned about the existence of the work after a 1985 Commodore infomercial that he saw on YouTube. In 2011 he started his search with the help of the Andy Warhol Museum along with Carnegie Mellon in order to restore the files. Considering that back then the files were stored using different extensions, preserving the artwork was a difficult task. Eventually the team broke the codes and discovered 28 images in signature Warhol style. Eleven of those images has Andy Warhol’s unique signature.

In a statement Arcangel said of the art work:

“What’s amazing is that by looking at these images, we can see how quickly Warhol seemed to intuit the essence of what it meant to express oneself, in what then was a brand-new medium: the digital.”

In other Andy Warhol news, as we previously reported, a controversy sparked on a famous painting he created of the late Farrah Fawcett. Recently Fawcett’s partner Ryan O’Neal was requesting ownership of the painting from the University of Austin at Texas, which is the school Fawcett attended and donated the portrait to. Fortunately a jury decided that Ryan O’Neal will be able to have the portrait in his possession.

[Image Credit:JStone / Shutterstock.com]