Andy Warhol

Born in Pittsburgh in 1928, Warhol studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York in 1949. He became a successful commercial illustrator and, by the early 1960s, emerged as a central figure in American Pop Art with paintings and screenprints based on Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe and other mass-media imagery.

Warhol embraced silkscreen printing because it allowed images to be repeated while retaining variations, accidents and imperfections. His studio, the Factory, became a meeting point for artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers and celebrities. Alongside painting and printmaking, he produced films, photographs, books, television projects and the magazine Interview.

Warhol died in New York in 1987. His influence extends far beyond Pop Art: his work anticipated contemporary debates around branding, celebrity, appropriation, image circulation and the relationship between art and commerce. Major museums worldwide hold his work, and his paintings and prints remain among the most recognised and actively collected works of post-war art.