Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola (Andy Warhol) was born in Pittsburgh (USA) on August 6, 1928. In 1948 he graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and moved to New York, where he soon found success as a commercial illustrator. In the 1950s, his illustrations were published in various magazines, such as "Glamor", and presented in department stores. The notoriety comes thanks to the designs of I. Miller footwear. In 1952 his illustrations for some of Truman Capote's writings were exhibited at the Hugo Gallery in New York. In 1956 he travels to Europe and Asia.
In the early sixties he began to paint characters from comics and images inspired by the world of advertising in works characterized by the repetition of common subjects, such as Coca-Cola bottles or tin cans of soups. Also in this period he painted various celebrities. His new works were exhibited in 1962, first at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and then in a solo show at the Stable Gallery in New York. In that year he began to use the screen printing technique. With the help of some assistants, he creates some series of works dedicated to “death and disasters”, flowers, cows, as well as numerous portraits. He also creates three-dimensional reproductions of Brillo boxes and other well-known household products.
Since the mid-sixties, in his New York studio, the Factory has dedicated himself to cinematography, with films that describe, among others, daily activities shot in their duration, such as Sleep (Sleeping) and Eat (Eating), both from 1963. In the early seventies he returned to painting and the actual pictorial gesture, creating monumental portraits of Mao Tse-Tung, commissioned portraits and the Hammer and Sickle series. He also dedicated himself to writing: his autobiography, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and back), was published in 1975, and the Factory in the meantime published a magazine, “Interview”. In 1970 the Pasadena Art Museum, in California, organized a retrospective of his, which was then exhibited in other locations both in the United States and abroad. Warhol died in New York on February 22, 1987.