1928 Born in Pittsburgh, PA
1945 - 1949 Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh. Major: Pictural Design.
1962 Founded The Factory
1969 Founded Interview Magazine
1987 Died in New York, NY
Andy Warhol began his career as a commercial illustrator, developing ads for the I. Miller Department store in New York. His first exhibition was in 1962, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which included all 32 of his Campbell's Soup Can renditions.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1928 as Andrew Warhola, Andy Warhol came to represent more than just the American condition. He became pivotal in the evolution of artistic production in relationship to mainstream mass-produced culture and commercialism. The founder and most influential figure of the Pop Art movement, Warhol received his training in graphic design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949. He then moved to New York City to begin his career as a commercial artist where he gained phenomenal success. By 1955, Warhol was the most successful and most-influential commercial artist in New York.
His career took flight when he produced the first of his window displays using enlarged comic strip images. Characters such as Superman and Popeye were among the popular images he incorporated into designer fashion. Needless to say, his department store windows drew a lot of attention, and Warhol garnered a reputation for the extreme. One of Warhol's most important developments was his use of enlarged photographic images which were silk screened directly onto canvas and/or paper. This technique enabled him to produce quickly and cheaply a series of mass-media images that he marketed to the public. Iconographic objects such as Soup Cans, U.S. Dollar Bills, Coca-Cola Bottles, as well as the various faces of celebrities and politicians became highly sought after by art aficionados.
In the late 1960s, Warhol experimented with the medium of film exploring such rhetorical topics as time, boredom, and repetition. He founded inter/VIEW magazine in 1969 (later changed to Interview in 1971), published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again and continued to produce silkscreens until his death in 1987.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2006 Warhol's World, Hauser & Wirth, London
2006 Man's Best Friend, Lococo Fine Art, St. Louis, MO
2006 Andy Warhol: Vanishing Animals, Medium SARL, Gustavia, St. Barthelemy
2005 Andy Warhol Self-Portraits, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
2004 Andy Warhol - Selbstportraits, Sprengel Museum, Hannover
2004 Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz
2004 The Late Andy Warhol - The Late Work, museum kunst palast, Dusseldorf
2004 Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, Kunstwerke, Berlin
2004 Andy Warhol, Anton Kern Gallery, New York
2004 Andy Warhol - LATE PAINTINGS, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
2003 Andy Warhol - The Time Capsules, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
2003 Warhol - Screen Tests, Museum of Modern Art, New York
2001 Retrospective, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
1999 Photography, The Andy Warhol Museum, Hamburg, Kunsthalle, travelled to Pittsburgh,
1998 Reframing Andy Warhol: Constructing American Myths, Heroes and Cultural Icons, University Art Gallery, Maryland
1993 Andy Warhol: Abstract, Basel, Kunsthalle, travelled to Vienna, Östereichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst; Valencia, IVAM,
1992 Andy Warhol Polaroids 1971 - 1986, New York, Pace/MacGill Gallery, travelled to London, Anthony d'Offay; Paris, Durand-Dessert,
1991 Andy Warhol's Video and Television, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1990 Andy Warhol: Films, IVAM, Valencia
1990 Andy Warhol: Cars-The Last Pictures, Kunstmuseum, Berne
1990 The Prints of Andy Warhol, Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York
1989 Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, Hayward Gallery, London
1989 Andy Warhol: Shadow Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, New York
1976 Venice Biennale
1970 Museum of Contempary Art, Chicago
1970 Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
1970 Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris
1970 Museum of Art, Pasadena, CA, toured the US
1969 Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
1968 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
1968 Moderna Museet, Stockholm
1967 Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne
1967 Ileana Sonnabend, Paris
1966 Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
1966 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
1965 Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
1964 Ileana Sonnabend, Paris
1964 Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
1964 Stable Gallery, New York
1963 Fetus Gallery, Los Angeles
1962 Fetus Gallery, Los Angeles
1952 Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote, Hugo Gallery, New York
Biography from Denis Bloch Fine Art
Andy Warhol was born with the name Andy Warhola in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania the son of working class Slovakian immigrants. His father was a construction worker and died in an accident when Andy was 13 years old. A sickly child and often confined to bed, Andy showed an early talent in drawing and painting.
After high school he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Warhol graduated in 1949 and went to New York where he worked as a commercial illustrator for magazines such as Vogue, Glamour and Harper's Bazaar. His whimsical and distinct drawing style quickly gained attention, and he enjoyed a successful career as an illustrator. The artist changed the spelling of his name in 1949 after he was credited as "Drawings by Warhol" for the article "Success is a Job in New York".
In 1952 Andy Warhol had his first one-man show at the Hugo Gallery in New York, and by 1956, he took part in an important group exhibition at the renowned Museum of Modern Art. In the early sixties Warhol started painting ordinary mass produced items like Campbell Soup cans, Brillo Boxes and Coke bottles and soon became a famous figure in the New York art scene. From 1962 on he started making silkscreen prints of famous personalities like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy among others.
The quintessence of Andy Warhol art was to remove the line between Fine Arts and the Commercial Arts used in magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums and advertising campaigns. Warhol once expressed his philosophy in one poignant sentence: "When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums". He established The Factory, his art studio-hangout-film stage where he and his art assistants congregated with B-film actors, musicians, celebrities and the social elite all of which inspired or took part in Warhol's creative mass production process.
In June 1968 the artist was shot by Valerie Solanis—a minor figure in the in the Factory crowd who had founded a group named SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men)—she was also its president and sole member. Warhol was seriously wounded and only narrowly escaped death spending two months in the hospital. When Solanis was arrested the day after, her words were "He had too much control over my life". Warhol never recovered completely from his wounds and had to wear a bandage around his torso for the rest of his life.
After the assassination attempt, Warhol made a radical turn in his process of producing art. The philosopher of artistic mass production now spent most of his time creating commissioned portraits of the rich and famous including Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli and Brigitte Bardot.
Warhol's activities became more and more entrepreneurial: He created the magazine Interview and even co-owned a night-club. In 1974 the Factory was moved to 860 Broadway. In 1975 Warhol published 'THE philosophy of Andy Warhol'. In the book he describes what art is: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." During the 1980s, Warhol collaborated with younger emerging artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Andy Warhol died February 22, 1987 from complications after gall bladder surgery. More than 2,000 people attended the memorial mass held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Warhol's will dictated that his estate be used to create a foundation dedicated to the "advancement of the visual arts". In 1987 the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was founded in his hometown of Pittsburgh and in 1994 the city welcomed The Andy Warhol Museum. The museum's permanent collection and archives make it the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world.
Quote:
"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."
Select Museum Collections:
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Getty Center, Los Angeles
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles
Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN
Tate Gallery, London