ANDY WARHOL

(Andrew Warhola; Pittsburgh, United States, 1928 - New York, 1987) American visual artist who became the best-known representative of Pop Art, an artistic movement in the 1950s and 1960s that drew inspiration from mass culture. He began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. Once settled in New York, he began his career as an advertising illustrator for various magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen, and The New Yorker.

 

He soon began exhibiting in various galleries. He progressively eliminated any expressionist traits from his work until he reduced it to a serial repetition of a popular element from mass culture, the world of consumption, or the media.

 

In 1962, he began using a mechanical screen printing process as his working method, through which he systematically reproduced myths of contemporary society, the most representative examples of which are the series dedicated to Marilyn Monroe , Elvis Presley , Elizabeth Taylor or Mao Tse-tung , as well as Campbell's soup cans.

 

The works from this period are characterized by the controversy they generated at the time. Both the use of color—sometimes monochrome, sometimes sharply contrasted, but always vibrant and bright—and the subject matter make his work consistently provocative and often unsettling. Through mass reproduction, he managed to strip the media fetishes he employed of their usual referents, transforming them into stereotypical icons with a purely decorative purpose.