For more information write to info@sangiorgioarte.it
Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh to a family of Ukrainian origin (his real name is Andy Warhola), the American Andy Warhol was, in the era in which consumerism gave life to a mass culture, the artist who perhaps more than everyone contributed to giving the latter an artistic face. Among the greatest interpreters of American pop art, he chose objects from everyday life as protagonists of his works, such as soup cans, demonstrating how even a daily consumer good can become art. At the same time, his works constitute an attack on the role of the mass media, which forces us to consume everything too quickly to give rise to new desires. It is curious to think that he became famous by painting subjects that he did not invent but only copied, such as industrial boxes, photographs of stars, or works by artists of the past such as Leonardo or Botticelli. Yet through his paintings Warhol offered an encyclopedia of images that characterize the modern era: banknotes and food boxed in colorful packages that matter more than what they contain, Hollywood stars, such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, or catastrophic car accident images. While denouncing modern stardom, i.e. the cult of famous people, with self-deprecating intentions Warhol also often reproduced his own image and behaved eccentrically to the point of transforming himself from an artist into a star: his hairstyles with white hair are famous. Two dramatic episodes involuntarily contributed to this stardom: the attack suffered in 1968 by an exalted woman and the death that occurred at the age of just fifty-nine (in 1987 in New York) following an operation. Warhol wanted to demonstrate that what matters is not the original creation but the executive technique, a technique which from an artistic process becomes an industrial process, mass production with the obsessive repetition of some subjects. Famous are the series of images reproducing Campbell's® soup cans, Coca-Cola® bottles, silk-screen prints (type of prints) of Jacqueline Kennedy and Elvis Presley, of Lenin and Mao Zedong. Having abandoned oil painting, the artist dedicated himself to transferring photographs onto canvas and retouched the images with deliberately aggressive and unnatural colours, such as reds and pinks, in order to impress the public. His works do not have the perfection of a photographic shot, on the contrary they reveal flows of color or black marks that prevent the image from being cold and impersonal and at the same time seem to consume it, reminding us that everything is only a consumer good. In the 1960s, Warhol also successfully dedicated himself to directing, helping to make underground cinema famous (literally «underground», and therefore experimental, i.e. produced outside the official circuits, independent and made at low cost). In New York the artist had gathered young misfits and non-conformists who shared his same creativity and with them he had set up a sort of cinema factory (not by chance called the Factory): a true hotbed of ideas, where provocative works of art and films were born and where everyone could express themselves freely. This group also included the unknown actors in his films, who were filmed while eating, smoking, sleeping or having sex (as in Kiss and Eat from 1963 and in Blue movie from 1968). An original director and lover of scandal, Warhol thus attacked American puritanism by describing the lives of drug addicts, homosexuals and transvestites. Technically, in an era in which the first special effects were being developed, the artist returned to using the camera in a static way, to using black and white films and to shooting scenes that were often devoid of dialogue and monotonous. Even the length of the films is a provocation: Sleep (1963) lasts six hours while Empire (1964) lasts eight!
