Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol, the pseudonym of Andrew Warhola Jr., was an American painter, sculptor, director, and even actor, but above all he was one of the absolute protagonists of the art of the second half of the 20th century and a central figure in the development of American Pop Art. He was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh (USA). From an early age, the artist showed enormous talent for art and, in fact, decided to study advertising art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Immediately after graduating from the Institute of Technology, he decided to leave Pittsburgh and move to New York, where he began working in the advertising world for some important fashion magazines. Warhol revolutionized the very concept of art by transforming images from mass culture, advertising, and consumerism into universal aesthetic icons. Through the use of silkscreen printing, serial repetition, and intense and artificial color, the artist investigated the relationship between art, media, and contemporary society, redefining the boundaries between high and low culture. Celebrated subjects such as Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s Soup, and Mao Zedong entered the international collective imagination, consecrating Warhol as the emblematic interpreter of visual modernity and the culture of the image. From 1963, Warhol surrounded himself with assistants in his laboratory, the Fabbrica, pushing the industrial character of his work to the extreme. In 1968, after being seriously wounded by a gunshot in his laboratory, he ended the collective adventure and began the series of portraits of celebrities, such as Mick Jagger, Calvin Klein, and Mao Zedong. The artist would spend his entire life in New York, where he died suddenly on February 22, 1987 at the age of fifty-eight. After his death, numerous objects belonging to the artist were sold at auction. The proceeds from these sales were used to fund the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. The Foundation, founded by the artist himself, aims to support and encourage contemporary artistic production and continues its activities at full speed to this day.