biografia

1. (Andrew Warhola; Pittsburgh, United States, 1928 - New York, 1987) American
plastic artist who became the best known representative of pop art, an artistic
trend in vogue during the 1950s and 1960s that was inspired by mass culture.
The son of Slovak immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute
of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year, already established in
New York, 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 whose subject matter was based on
some element or image of the everyday environment, advertising or comics.
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 from mass culture, the world of consumerism or the media.
This evolution reached its maximum level of depersonalization in 1962, when he
began to use a mechanical silkscreen printing process as his working method,
through 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 made during the fruitful
decade of the 1960s.
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.
Another outstanding facet of his work is its powerful visual force, which in large
part comes from his knowledge of the mechanisms of the advertising medium.
In 1963 he created the Factory, a workshop in which many of New York's
underground culture figures gathered around him. The frivolity and
extravagance that marked his way of life eventually 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.
In fact, he was one of the first creators to consciously exploit his image for self-
promotional purposes; in this way, and through a process of identification, he

2. 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 strong sexual and
erotic content: Kiss (1963), Empire (1964), Chelsea girls (1966). In a last stage
he returned to a more traditional format and shot The loves of Ondine (1967)
and Women in revolt (1970).