Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola (1928-1987) was born to Slovakian immigrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York City in the late 1940s and adopting the name Andy Warhol. He began his creative career as a commercial designer and window display artist. Warhol soon shot to fame. In the 1950s, the artist developed a rudimentary print-making technique wherein he would apply ink to paper then quickly blot it while still wet. He is widely recognized for establishing Pop Art in the early 1960s when he used mass-produced symbols, commercial goods, and popular celebrities in his work; examples of this include dollar bills, Campbell's soup cans, and Marilyn Monroe. He opened “The Factory” in 1963 and used it as an art studio as well as venue for his extravagant parties of socialites. It became one of the places to be in New York City. In the 1970s, Warhol continued to experiment with film and painting, and particularly enjoyed painting commissioned portraits for wealthy patrons. His popularity experienced a resurgence in the 1980s, in part due to collaborations with the younger cadre of Neo-Expressionists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel. His thrilling career was unexpectedly cut short when he passed away in 1987.

Warhol’s oeuvre is managed by his Estate, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. His work is collected by such esteemed institutions as the Museum of Modern Art (New York City, USA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, USA), the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, China), and GAM Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Turin, Italy). He founded Interview magazine and the New York Academy of Art, and published books. The Andy Warhol Museum in his birthplace of Pittsburgh is the largest, single-artist museum in the United States and in 2022 his painting Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) made history as the most expensive artwork sold at auction by an American artist ($195M). His pieces are present in many private collections, the most notable being Jose Mugrabi's.