Andy Warhol

ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA, 1928 - New York, USA, 1987).
"Marilyn (Hot Pink & Yellow Led Neon)," 2002.
Wall sculpture with Multicolor LED neon lights on polymer.
Signature stamped on back (on label).
Numbered on reverse, edition of 500 (on label).
Published with the permission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts 2022.
Publisher's certificate of authenticity. Numbered and dated 2022.
Enclosed switch, transformer, power cord, wall screws and original artwork box.
Measurements: 52 x 52 cm; 54.5 x 60.5 x 6.5 cm (box).

Neon version of the iconic Marilyn that Warhol created as an advertisement for the exhibition "Andy Warhol: A Print Retrospective 1963-1981", held from November 21 to December 22, 1981 at the Castelli Gallery in New York. Obsessed with celebrities, consumer culture and mechanical reproduction, the pop artist created some of the most iconic images of the 20th century. In his most famous works, he drew inspiration from popular culture and movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Rejecting the dominant modes of painting and sculpture of his time, Warhol adopted screen printing to achieve his characteristic flat areas of color. By adopting commercial methods, Warhol transformed the image of Marilyn, the most desired diva, into a consumer product that anyone could buy for a price.

Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, filmmaker and music producer who played a crucial role in the birth and development of pop art. Considered at the time a 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).