Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a leading artist in the Pop Art movement, whose career spanned four decades. He is widely considered the most influential figure in contemporary art and culture. An inter-disciplinary artist, Warhol worked across mediums, including printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and music. Embracing market and consumerist culture, his work explores the relationship between advertisement, celebrity culture, and visual art. His most iconic imagery is of American objects, including dollar bills, mushroom clouds, electric chairs, Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and the Brillo box; and celebrities, among them Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Muhammad Ali. He ran his studio, The Factory, as a space for the era’s intelligentsia, celebrities, and collectors to gather. The Andy Warhol Museum, the largest museum in the US dedicated to an individual artist, is located in Pittsburgh and holds an extensive collection of his art and archives.
Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Warhol studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York City in 1949. He gained notoriety in the 1950s for his ink drawings of shoe advertisements, and shown at the Bodley Gallery. He quickly adopted the silkscreen printmaking process during this time, but didn’t show his pop art in a solo exhibition in New York until 1962. Seven years later he founded Interview Magazine. In the 1960s, his work was based on comic and advertisements, before focusing on paintings in the 1970s, when he completed many commissioned portraits. During the 1980s, he was affiliated with a number of prolific artists from a younger generation, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Julian Schnable, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, and David Salle and produced several collaborations with many of them.
He has had major exhibitions and retrospectives of his work internationally, including the 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2001, a major retrospective began in Berlin and traveled to the Tate in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His work is in most major museum collections. He died at the age of 58 from cardiac arrhythmia.