Andy Warhol

Everything is sort of artificial. I don´t know where the artificial stops and the real starts. A.W. Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928. In 1945 he majored in pictorial design at the Carnegie University. Upon graduation, Warhol moved to New York where he worked as an illustrator for several magazines including Vogue and the New Yorker and did advertising and window displays for big retail stores. Prophetically, his first assignment was for Glamour magazine for an article titled "Success in New York". Throughout the 50s, Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist experimenting with comic-like artworks. He came in contact with the famous gallery owner Leo Castelli, who revealed that Roy Lichtenstein had presented his comics there only a couple of weeks before.Warhol was forced to find his own style, finally making standardization the basic theme of his art by creating distant images of banal products of the consumer world. Colour only contributes to increase the unrealty of a given image based on an actual photograph, such as with the screenprints of "Disasters" or the"Electric Chair" series. His icons "Elvis" or "Marylin" don´t show human beings but products of a commercial world.