Andy Warhol - Selected works under £100,000

Fascinated by consumer culture, the media, and fame, Andy Warhol himself became one of the most famous and important
artists of the twentieth century.
The son of Czechoslovakian immigrants, Andrew Warhola grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studying art at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1949. Soon after graduating he moved to New York City, where he
abbreviated his name to Andy Warhol and began working as a commercial designer and window display artist, winning
several awards for his distinctive advertising designs. At the same time, he was developing his own style of painting, which
was inspired by mass culture, a subject that riveted the artist and dominated his entire oeuvre. By the early 1960s, Warhol's
paintings of dollar bills, soup cans, and movie stars established his status as the founder of pop art. Repetition was a key to
Warhol's work, as evidenced by his many recurrent series which included flowers, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis, and Chairman Mao, among others. Warhol deliberately infused his work with a mechanical and impersonal
character that intensified when he adopted silkscreen printing techniques in order to increase his production. To accelerate
this process even further, he employed a large group of assistants in his studio, dubbed "The Factory." This practice
brilliantly reflected the commercial, industrial economy of the mechanical reproduction age.
Warhol was also a popular and influential figure in the underground film movement; his documentary approach often
focused on banal and repetitive subject matter. In the 1970s he shifted his attention back to painting portraits of famous
people, mainly working on commission. Warhol's bland persona, platinum wig, and public statements such as, "In the
future everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes," epitomized the underground culture of the 1960s and 1970s. In
1975 he published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. During the 1980s Warhol often collaborated with younger artists,
including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. His flamboyant career was suddenly cut short in 1987 when he
died of complications after gall bladder surgery.