Andy Warhol’s 1964 sculpture series “Brillo Boxes” consists of painted wooden replicas of commercial Brillo Soap Pads cartons, finished with silkscreened product graphics. By presenting a familiar supermarket package as sculpture, Warhol challenged the boundary between ordinary merchandise and fine art.
The first boxes were made in late 1963 and early 1964. Carpenters constructed plywood boxes to the dimensions of real cartons, after which Warhol and assistants painted them and applied the Brillo branding. The packaging design was created by commercial illustrator James Harvey, whose graphic work Warhol reproduced rather than inventing from scratch.
Warhol first exhibited the boxes at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles in February 1964, then showed them prominently at the Stable Gallery in New York beginning April 21. Hundreds were arranged in warehouse-like stacks, reinforcing ideas of repetition, mass production and consumer culture.
The title can cause confusion because Warhol also made boxes for Campbell’s Tomato Juice, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and other products. Those belong to the broader box-sculpture project; the Brillo-labelled works are specifically “Brillo Boxes.”