Andy Warhol

ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA, 1928 - New York, USA, 1987).
"Perrier (White)," 1983.
Offset color lithograph on graphic art paper.
Signature on plate.
Measurements: 44.5 x 59.3 cm.

American plastic artist who became the best known representative of pop art, an artistic current in vogue during the 1950s and 1960s that was inspired by mass culture. The son of Slovakian immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year 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 with everyday, advertising or comic themes. 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 coming from mass culture, the world of consumption 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. The use of images of massive diffusion, easily recognizable by all kinds of audiences, such as the aforementioned soup cans or Coca-Cola bottles, became one of the most interesting and stable features of his entire production. On other occasions he crudely captured real situations, such as accidents, street fights, funerals or suicides; within this theme, Electric chair is one of his most significant works. This appropriationism, constant in the works of the supporters of pop art, extended to universal works of art by authors such as Rafael Sanzio, Giorgio de Chirico, Edvard Munch or Leonardo da Vinci. 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 decorative meaning. In 1963 he created the Factory, a workshop in which he brought together numerous figures from New York's underground culture. The frivolity and extravagance that marked his way of life established a coherent line between his work and his life's trajectory; his peculiar appearance, androgynous and permanently topped with a characteristic blond fringe, ended up defining a new icon: the artist himself. He was one of the first creators to consciously exploit his image for self-promotional purposes; through a process of identification, he acquired in the eyes of the public the meanings of just another advertising product. In 1963 he began a film career based on the same principles as his plastic work (such as visual reiteration), sometimes with a strong sexual and erotic content.