Andy Warhol

ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, U.S., 1928 – New York, U.S., 1987).
“Lion,” 1975.
Color offset lithograph on laid paper, full sheet.
Signed with initials in pencil on the front and numbered on the back, from an edition of 5,000 copies.
Published by Bolaffi Arte, Turin (with its embossed seal), printed in Italy.
Provenance: Private collection, Italy.
Good condition, slight yellowing at the margins.
Measurements: 28 x 21 cm.

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 in his day a guru of modernity, Warhol has been one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The son of Slovak immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In 1949, having settled in New York, he began his career as a commercial illustrator for various magazines such as *Vogue*, *Harper’s Bazaar*, *Seventeen*, and *The New Yorker*. At the same time, he painted canvases whose themes were based on elements or images from everyday life, advertising, or comic books. He soon began exhibiting in various galleries. He gradually eliminated any expressionist traits from his work until his art was reduced to a serial repetition of a popular element drawn from mass culture, the world of consumerism, or the media. This evolution reached its peak of depersonalization in 1962, when he adopted a mechanical screen-printing process as his working method, through which he systematically reproduced icons of contemporary society; the most representative examples of this are the series dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and Mao Zedong, as well as his famous treatment of Campbell’s soup cans—all of which were created during the prolific 1960s. This appropriationism, a constant feature in the works of Pop Art advocates, extended to works of art of a universal nature. Through mass reproduction, he managed to strip the media fetishes he employed of their usual references, transforming them into stereotypical icons with purely decorative significance.In 1963, he founded the Factory, a studio where numerous figures from New York’s underground culture gathered around him. The frivolity and extravagance that characterized his lifestyle ultimately established a coherent connection between his art and his life’s journey. His work is currently represented in the world’s most important contemporary art museums, such as MoMA, the Metropolitan, and the Guggenheim in New York; the Fukuoka Museum of Art in Japan; the Kunstmuseum in Basel; the National Museum of 21st-Century Art in Rome; the MUMOK in Vienna, the SMAK in Ghent, and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as in the museums bearing his name in Pittsburgh and Medzilaborce (Slovakia).