Setdart Subastas S.L
Lot 154
ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA, 1928 - New York, USA, 1987)."From de Sonaben Collection, Gagosian, 2009.Lithograph poster.Unsigned.Size: 76 x 50,5 cm.Double-sided lithograph poster with Warhol's Sonnabend Collection in the show at Gagosian New York in 2009.Warhol's Sonnabend Collection remains, to this day, one of the most iconic pieces of his work. The Gagosian wanted to create a poster for the exhibition that would be "a snapshot of the history of Warhol's art collecting".An American visual artist who became the best known representative of pop art, an artistic trend in vogue during the 1950s and 1960s that was inspired by mass culture. The son of Slovakian immigrants, he began his art studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year he began his career as an advertising cartoonist for various magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen and The New Yorker. At the same time he painted canvases with everyday, advertising and comic themes. He soon began to exhibit in various galleries. He progressively eliminated any expressionist traits from his works until he reduced them to a serial repetition of a popular element from mass culture, the world of consumerism or the media. This evolution reached its peak of depersonalisation in 1962, when he began to use a mechanical silkscreen printing process as his working method, by means of which he systematically reproduced myths of contemporary society, the most representative examples of which are the series dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Tse-tung, as well as his famous treatment of Campbell's soup cans, all works produced during the fruitful decade of the 1960s. The use of mass-circulated images, easily recognisable by all kinds of audiences, such as the aforementioned soup cans or Coca-Cola bottles, became one of the most interesting and stable features of his entire output. On other occasions he crudely depicted real situations, such as accidents, street fights, funerals or suicides; within this theme, Electric chair is one of his most significant works. This appropriationism, a constant feature of the work of the supporters of Pop Art, extended to universal works of art by authors such as Raphael Sanzio, Giorgio de Chirico, Edvard Munch and Leonardo da Vinci. Through mass reproduction, he succeeded in stripping the media fetishes he used of their usual referents, turning them into stereotypical icons with a decorative meaning. In 1963 he set up the Factory, a workshop in which many of New York's underground culture gathered around him. The frivolity and extravagance that marked his way of life established a coherent line between his work and his life's trajectory; his peculiar appearance, androgynous and permanently topped with a characteristic blond fringe, ended up defining a new icon: the artist himself. He was one of the first artists to consciously exploit his image for self-promotional purposes; through a process of identification, he acquired in the eyes of the public the significance of just another advertising product. In 1963 he began a film career based on the same principles as his plastic work (such as visual reiteration), sometimes with a strong sexual and erotic content.
