ANDY WARHOL
Andy Warhol, an American artist born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and who died in New York in 1987, studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York in 1949. He first established himself as a successful commercial illustrator, working notably for Tiffany & Co., The New York Times, as well as major department stores and publications. In the early 1960s, he turned his attention fully to fine art and became one of the central figures of Pop Art, bringing imagery drawn from advertising, the press, consumer products and celebrity culture into the realm of art.
Working from pre-existing images that he repeated, cropped and transformed, Warhol developed a visual language based on seriality and mechanical reproduction. The Campbell’s Soup Cans, his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, followed by series such as Death and Disaster, Mao and Skulls, explore the way an image can acquire, lose or alter its meaning through repetition. Silkscreen printing became one of his defining techniques, allowing him to experiment with variations in colour, shifts in registration and repetition. His practice, however, extended far beyond painting: photography, drawing, film, video, publishing and performance all contributed to a broader reflection on the circulation of images and the construction of identity within contemporary culture.
Warhol’s work has been the subject of numerous international retrospectives, notably at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His works are now held in the collections of major institutions worldwide, while The Andy Warhol Museum, which opened in Pittsburgh in 1994, is dedicated to his work and archives. From the Factory and his experimental films to his silkscreen portraits and the creation of Interview magazine, Warhol considerably expanded the role and territory of the artist and profoundly shaped the visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century. His influence remains central to the ways in which contemporary art engages with images, celebrity, media and reproduction.
“The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away.” — Andy Warhol
