Andy Warhol — Signed Invitation, Anthony d'Offay Gallery (1986)

In 1986 the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London presented one of the most significant series of Andy Warhol's late career: the Self Portraits made in the second half of the 1980s. The exhibition marked a turn in how the artist chose to be seen. The star of Pop Art gave way to something more austere and more disturbing — a face rendered as a mask, flattened by the screenprint process, closer to an emblem than to a likeness.

The original invitation to that exhibition, signed by Warhol, is a document of the moment in which the most photographed man of his generation turned the camera on himself and produced an image that has since become inseparable from his legend. Ephemera of this kind — signed, dated to the exhibition, and tied to a specific gallery presentation — is among the most collected material in the Warhol universe, prized by collectors who want the historical trace rather than a later reproduction.

Its appeal is precisely its scale: a single sheet, signed by the artist, that places the late self-portraits in their original context and gives a collection a documentary anchor alongside the prints themselves.