Andy Warhol

ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA, 1928 - New York, USA, 1987).
Untitled.
Ink drawing on an envelope in his studio.
Signed.
Stamp on the back.
Measurements: 9,5 x 14,5 cm.

The original drawing by Andy Warhol now on auction is closely related to his "Flowers" series, one of his most emblematic productions and, apparently, also one of the simplest. For this series, Warhol took as a starting point a photograph published in a magazine, which he reinterpreted using his characteristic silkscreen printing technique, allowing him to generate multiple versions through chromatic variations and diverse combinations.

Andy Warhol was an American plastic artist, filmmaker and music producer who played a crucial role in the birth and development of pop art. Considered in his time the guru of modernity, Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The son of Slovakian immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year, already established in New York, he began his career as an advertising cartoonist for various magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen and The New Yorker. At the same time he painted canvases whose subject matter was based on some element or image from the everyday environment, advertising or comics. Soon he began to exhibit in various galleries. He progressively eliminated from his works any expressionist trait until he reduced the work to a serial repetition of a popular element from mass culture, the world of consumerism or the media. This evolution reached its maximum level of depersonalization in 1962, when he began to use a mechanical silkscreen printing process as a working method, by means of 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 his famous treatment of Campbell's soup cans, all of them works produced during the fruitful decade of the 1960s. This appropriationism, a constant in the works of the proponents of pop art, extended to works of art of a universal nature. By means of mass reproduction, he managed to strip the media fetishes he used of their usual referents and turn them into stereotyped icons with a merely decorative purpose. In 1963 he created the Factory, a workshop in which numerous figures from New York's underground culture gathered around him. The frivolity and extravagance that marked his way of life eventually established a coherent line between his work and his life's trajectory. He is currently represented in the most important contemporary art museums in the world, such as the MoMA, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim in New York, the Fukoka Museum in Japan, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the National Art Museum of the 21st century in Rome, the MUMOK in Vienna, the SMAK in Ghent and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as in the museums that bear his name in Pittsburgh and Medzilaborce (Slovakia).