Andy Warhol

Painted at the dawn of the 1980s, the decade which ushered in a new climate of financial prosperity, the Dollar Signs, one of Warhol's great late series, show the artist returning to the theme of money that he first explored in his pioneering silk-screened dollar bills from 1962. Triple Dollar Sign is one of the best examples of its kind, its status elevated by the crispness of the registration of the saturated colours against the immaculate white ground. While the majority of works in the series isolate a single dollar against a coloured ground, in the present example the motif is reiterated across the horizontal format echoing his serial images of the 1960s, its replication laying bare the consumerist impulse driving modern society.

Like Warhol's first Pop paintings which examined the relationship between big business and the common man through enlarged icons of consumerism like Coca Cola and Campbell's soup, Warhol here similarly takes the currency of this relationship and brusquely presents it with all the brazen euphoria synonymous with advancing consumerism. No longer taking the entire bill as their subject but instead focusing on the unabashed icon of money - the totemic, isolated '$' - Warhol hones in on arguably the biggest brand of all. One of the most recognised logos anywhere in the world, simultaneously a symbol of the American Dream and international denominator of wealth. Having removed any specific denominations, the currency symbol takes on a more generalised, iconic status.

This, Warhol's last series of money paintings, metaphorically reveals that by 1981, Pop art was a historical triumph and an entrenched cultural phenomenon. They mirror his larger-than-life, personal exuberance and surpass mere pictorial depiction to become a form of cultural currency in themselves. With its brash palette, this is one of Warhol's most ostentatious and flagrantly capitalistic explorations into the theme. Tantalising and full of promise, it is like a shrine to wealth. Gleaming with the sparkling promise of a new era of prosperity, it dramatically prefigures the atmosphere of exuberance and extravagance that characterised the cash-rich art world of the ensuing decade.