Little Electric Chair, a green silkscreen print by Andy Warhol (at Pace’s 125 Newbury Gallery), is one of two dozen or so iterations of chairs in the show. There are chairs hanging, chairs fixed to the wall, a tiny chair by Joel Shapiro. Several ruler lengths down from where the label with Joel Shapiro’s name was affixed to the wall was the cast-iron chair, barely three inches tall, which I almost missed.

Warhol produced a number of Little Electric Chair prints from 1963 to 1965. This series, printed more or less ten years following the ban of capital punishment in the US and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg via the electric chair, at Sing Sing in upstate New York in 1953. The electric chair image in Warhol’s silkscreen prints is repurposed from the “news wire service image” accompanying the announcement of the Rosenbergs’ execution in various US newspapers. The chair itself is mentioned as the means of their death in the front page story in the New York Daily News, for example, with the headline, “SPIES DIE IN CHAIR.”

The chair image, repeated 15 times, in Lavender Disaster (1963) becomes hard to dispel, its afterimage lingering in the mind’s eye for minutes after looking away. Though Warhol might have disagreed with me, having said in reference to the Electric Chair prints he made, such as Lavender Disaster and Orange Disaster, “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.”