Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. He graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1949. Known as one of the most influential representatives and founder of the American Pop Art movement, he died in 1987 in New York city and leaves a substantial oeuvre of graphic prints, paintings and objects behind.

Early in his career he worked as a commercial artist and illustrator, and towards the 1960s he began consolidating his well-known style of large-scale, colorful prints of popular consumer goods and other advertising related images that were prevalent in mass media. Warhol eventually became the main exponent of Pop Art, which introduced images of consumer culture into works of art that were manufactured with mass production techniques and blurred the boundaries between high and commercial art. His diverse oeuvre includes paintings, prints, sculptures and films that are often grouped in series that focus on different issues such as consumerism, violence, celebrity culture and even include socio-political commentary. At the same time, Warhol's works commented on the fundamentals of the medium by highlighting the conflict between medium and subject matter. He frequently transformed banal objects into items meant for adoration; and in other occasions his endless repetition of dramatic images stripped them of all meaning. Warhol's intriguing works are imbued with a poignant, powerful commentary and challenge to the status quo.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. His work is part of the most prestigious private and public collections such as the Museum Of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum Of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York; the Art Institute Of Chicago; the Tate in London, or the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland just to name a few. The Andy Warhol Museum founded in 1994 in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. In November 2018, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, opened a retrospective featuring over 350 of Andy Warhol's works - from his earliest paintings to his late films.