| Andy Warhol |
Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, USA, 1928 – New York, USA, 1987), the son of a couple of Czech immigrants, studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1949, and began working as an advertisement illustrator in New York in 1950. It was in 1960 that Andy Warhol began his artistic career, which saw him become the predominant figure of American Pop Art in a very short time. Beginning in 1962, he began using screen-printing techniques, turning his attention to the reproduction of everyday images, worthy of the title of "symbolic icons" of his time. He also dealt with issues charged with tension, such as Car Crash and Electric Chair. Pop Art interprets the themes most typical of American popular culture, sometimes mocking them, sometimes amplifying its undeniable effects of suggestion. There is no aesthetic choice in these works, nor is there any intention to cause controversy with regard to mass society: it is only these works which document what the visual universe has become, the universe which sees the movement of that which we define as today’s "society of the image".
In the following years he decided to embrace a wider project, putting himself forward as an entrepreneur of the popular creative avant-garde. It was for this reason that he set up the "Factory", which can be considered a kind of collective workshop. In 1964 he exhibited at the Galerie Sonnabend in Paris and at Leo Castelli in New York. For the American Pavilion at the International Fair of New York he realised the Thirteen Most Wanted Men. The following year he exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In 1969 he founded the magazine "Interview", which broadened its outlook from being an instrument of reflection on cinema to include fashion, art, culture and society life. Beginning from this date, until 1972, he created portraits, some on commission. In 1986 he dedicated himself to creating portraits of Lenin and some self portraits. Over the last years of his life he also recreated some of the works of the great masters of the Renaissance: Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and most of all Leonardo, who inspired his "Last Supper" cycle. In the spring of 1988, 10,000 of the artist's personal possessions were sold at auction by Sotheby's to finance the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. In 1989 the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a lavish retrospective to him. |
|
|
