Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) was an American artist, filmmaker, and cultural icon known for a leading role in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Warhol graduated from Carnegie...
Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) was an American artist, filmmaker, and cultural icon known for a leading role in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Warhol graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, and then moved to New York City and gained success as a commercial artist. In the late 1950’s he began painting and received sudden fame in 1962, with his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and other consumer goods. Warhol pioneered the development of photographic silkscreen prints in the 1960s. The screenprinting technique enabled him to continue his series of purposefully cliched consumer goods but on a mass-produced scale. With the screenprint, Warhol notably started printing celebrity portraits as well. The repetition of garishly colored mass-media images ingeniously reflected the banality, emptiness, and ambiguity of American culture. In 1987, the artist died unexpectedly from routine gallbladder surgery at the age of 58. After his death, The Andy Warhol Foundation was created as well as a museum dedicated to the artist in his native Pittsburgh. Warhol’s work resides in museums and galleries around the world such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London. Recently, a retrospective of his work was shown at the Whitney Museum in 2019.