Andy Warhol was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh to a family of Ukrainian origin An eclectic character, painter, photographer, filmmaker, obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture and mechanical reproduction, Andy Warhol created some of the most iconic images of the 20th century After graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology in his hometown, the artist moved to New York and it was here that he began working as an advertising graphic designer for magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazar and Glamour From the world of advertising Andy Warhol came to art as an objective recording of reality: photography is the basis of Andy Warhol’s artistic research, many of his works in fact originate from photographs, some taken directly by him, others taken from newspapers and then reworked
In his most famous works, he has drawn extensively from popular culture and everyday subjects; the artist paints subjects that he copies from reality such as industrial boxes, banknotes, food canned in colourful packaging, works by artists of the past such as Leonardo or Botticelli, Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean or catastrophic images of traffic accidents Warhol’s works are also implicit attacks on the role of the mass media that force us to consume everything too quickly, constantly giving rise to new desires…
At the beginning of the 1960s, years in which the American art scene was dominated by action painting that originated from an improvisational gesture in which colour was spontaneously dripped onto the canvas, Warhol executed his first drawings dedicated to the world of comic strips and advertising, strongly influenced by the works of Roy Lichtenstein (New York, 1923 – 1997) seen at the exhibition by Leo Castelli
Rejecting the dominant modes of painting and sculpture of his time, from 1962 Warhol experimented with the industrial technique of silk-screen printing on canvas, with which he took the principle of the unlimited reproducibility of the work of art to its extreme consequences; he used bright and unnatural colours
What counts for Warhol is not the creation of something original, something new, but the execution technique, a technique that from an artistic process becomes an industrial process, mass production through the obsessive repetition of certain subjects Famous are the series of images reproducing Campbell’s soup boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, silk-screen prints of Jacqueline Kennedy and Elvis Presley, of Lenin and Mao Zedong
In New York in 1964, the artist gathered around him emerging artists, creative young people and non-conformists with whom he had created what Warhol called the ‘Factory’: a centre of artistic production where everyone could express themselves freely and in which provocative artworks and films were created that dealt with social issues such as homosexuality and drug addiction His artistic production was a point of reference for artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat
In 1962 he exhibited for the first time at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and in 1964 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and the following year in Paris at the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery Warhol was the subject of exhibitions in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris
Andy Warhol, the father of Pop Art, died in New York in 1987
Ladies and gentlemen
Electric chairs #77
Mildred Scheel 239
