Sunset (1972) stands apart from almost everything else in Andy Warhol's graphic output. Where his most celebrated print series - the Marilyn Monroes, the Maos, the Campbell's Soup Cans - drew their power from the collision of the silkscreen process with the imagery of mass culture and celebrity, Sunset turns instead to the elemental: a circle, a horizon, a sky. The result is one of the most ambitious, formally rigorous, and quietly revelatory print projects of the twentieth century.

The commission came from the architects Johnson and Burgee for the newly renovated Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis - a project that reflected Warhol's long-standing friendship with Philip Johnson, himself a significant collector of the artist's work. Rather than produce identical prints for each room, Warhol engineered something far more radical: 632 genuinely unique impressions, each a distinct chromatic event, using only three screens to generate an extraordinary range of atmospheric and emotional registers. One screen laid down the horizontal bands of sky and horizon; a second printed the circular sun; a third introduced a single-colour dot pattern across broad fields of ink. Through controlled variation in ink colour, density, and registration, Warhol transformed these minimal elements into an inexhaustible study of light, time, and perception.

The source imagery drew on an unfinished film project commissioned by the de Menil family for the Rothko Chapel, in which Warhol filmed sunsets across America. Though the film was never completed, the motif found its fullest expression here - the atmospheric ombré sky moving deliberately beyond naturalistic representation, using tone and intensity to evoke the fleeting quality of light at dusk.

Of the 632 impressions, 472 were installed directly in the hotel's guest rooms, corridors, and public spaces, each identifiable by an ink stamp on the reverse reading Hotel Marquette Prints. The remaining 160 were reserved for portfolios of four. Following the hotel's refurbishment in 1981, all hotel prints were removed from the building and returned to Warhol, at which point they were individually signed, numbered, and dated in pencil on verso.

This impression - numbered 93 in pencil on verso and bearing the Hotel Marquette Prints ink stamp - is one of the 472 prints that hung in the hotel as originally intended, and is therefore a primary document of the project in its commissioned architectural context. It was not signed by Warhol at the time of the prints' return in 1981, which distinguishes it from the fully finished hotel edition and places it as a proof impression within that group. This is a material distinction that is reflected honestly in the listing: the impression retains its full historical and institutional significance as an original Hotel Marquette print, while the absence of signature represents a point of difference from the signed numbered examples that collectors should note.

The Sunset portfolio is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Printed by Salvatore Silkscreen Co., Inc., New York. Published by David Whitney, New York.