Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) art encapsulates the 1960s through the 1980s in New York. By imitating the familiar aesthetics of mass media, advertising, and celebrity culture, Warhol blurred the boundaries between his work and the world that inspired it, producing images that have become as pervasive as their sources.

Warhol grew up in a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh. His parents were Slovak immigrants, and he was the only member of his family to attend college. He entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1945, where he majored in pictorial design. After graduation, he moved to New York with fellow student Philip Pearlstein and found steady work as a commercial illustrator at several magazines. Throughout the 1950s Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist, winning several commendations from the Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. The year 1960 marked a turning point in Warhol’s prolific career. He painted his first works based on comics and advertisements, enlarging and transferring the source images onto canvas using a projector. In 1968, Warhol entered a more subdued, isolated period, working primarily on a commissioned basis and painting portraits for various patrons, while also revisiting themes from his earlier work. By the early 1980s Warhol was producing work across media with a renewed vigor, hosting half-hour programs on MTV, publishing books, and collaborating with younger artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. Warhol’s ability to seamlessly combine art historical reference, abstract patterns, and mass media set new standards for the role of the artist, permanently blurring the lines between commercial and fine art.

Source: Gagosian