Eight Elvises is composed of eight identical, overlapping images of Elvis Presley in cowboy attire, silkscreened over a silver background.
[1][2] The painting was originally a portion of a 37-foot long (11 m) piece, containing sixteen copies of Elvis, that was showcased in a 1963 exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
The exhibition, Warhol's second at the Ferus, contained several other pieces using the same image of Elvis, as well as a series of head shots of Elizabeth Taylor.
[6] News of the sale, which was not announced publicly at the time, was broken by art writer Sarah Thornton and published in The Economist in late 2009.
[6] Another painting from 1963, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), broke the valuation record for a Warhol work set by Eight Elvises when it sold for $105.4 million at auction in November 2013.