Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987), artist, printmaker, film maker, director, the producer was a leading light in the pop are a movement. Born on 6th August 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Warhol studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he joined the Beaux-Arts Society and took on the role of Art Director of the student magazine Cano. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949, and later that year began his career in magazine illustration in New York City.

Warhol began exhibiting his work during the 1950s. He held several exhibitions at the Hugo Gallery and the Bodley Gallery in New York, and the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (the debut of his famous Cambell’s Soup Cans). His first solo exhibition was held at Stable Gallery in New York in 1962. The same year, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) hosted a Symposium on Pop Art featuring Warhol’s work.

Warhol founded his own studio “The Factory” in the early 1960s, and a wide range of artists, writers, celebrities and musicians collaborated or exhibited there. Warhol was included in many exhibitions alongside contemporary pop artists; particularly seminal to his career was the 1964 exhibit The American Supermarket held in Paul Bianchini’s gallery in New York. The show – designed like the average American supermarket – confronted Warhol’s viewers with questions of consumerism, the perennial nature of what art is - or should be - and the links between market culture and artistic representation or documentation.

The 1960s served as a backdrop to Warhol’s filmography; he made more than 60 films between 1963 – 1968 and continued to produce and paint, all the while challenging viewers to reconceive their notion of art and embrace the necessity of popular culture’s presence within institutions such as galleries, museums and art fairs.

Warhol began to work to commission in the 1970s, painting celebrity portraits which would later be exhibited in the Jewish Museum in Manhattan in 1980. In the wake of an attempt on his life in 1968, Warhol increased greater security at The Factory and devoted more time to securing wealthy patrons he could paint for commission. His subjects included Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s sister Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, Mick Jagger, Prince and Diana Ross. Warhol founded Interview Magazine in 1975, using the medium to publish his views on philosophy, art and the blurred lines between creativity and business. In 1979, Warhol founded the New York Academy of Art.

Warhol’s death in 1987 saw him leave his entire estate to a foundation dedicated to the visual arts, named The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Warhol’s collectors are worldwide, with a large repository of his work on display at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.