Andrew Warhol (1928, Pennsylvania, United States-1987, New York, United States) was born to to Slovak migrants. From 1945 to 1949 Warhol studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh before moving to New York. There he worked as an illustrator for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, producing advertisements and window displays. Meanwhile he began to paint and in 1952 had his first solo exhibition at New York’s Hugo Gallery.

Influenced by meeting Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Warhol worked increasingly to establish himself as a serious painter. His first Pop Art paintings, from 1960, use images from adverts and comics. He began using an Abstract Expressionist style but eventually moved on to adopt a more pared-down, inexpressive style that sought to challenge notions of what art is. Exhibiting paintings of rows of Campbell’s soup cans and Coca- Cola bottles in 1962, Warhol achieved notoriety. In 1962 Warhol founded the Factory, where he could depict massed ranks of goods using mass- production screen printing. In this art studio, assistants carried out much of the work under his supervision, distancing him further from the traditional artist’s role.

From 1963 Warhol began experimenting with film, and by 1968 he had made over 60 films and 500 or so short black-and-white portrait clips of visitors to the Factory. Works such as Empire (1964), an eight-hour film, present boredom as an extreme aesthetic experience. Warhol’s impersonal approach extends into the films, which generally lack narrative and use improvised dialogue. In June 1968, he was shot and seriously injured by Valerie Solanis of the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM).

During the 1960s and 1970s, Warhol produced portrait prints of Hollywood personalities and rock stars, fashion designers, artists, and political leaders, among them Liz Taylor, Brigitte Bardot and Mao Zedong.

Among the most experimental of his later pieces are two ventures into virtual abstraction. Shadows (1979) is a sequence of 102 screen-prints from a hugely enlarged photograph of a diagonal shadow cast by a painting in Warhol’s studio. Mounted side-by-side right around the exhibition space, with black sectors butted up against glowing colour, they have something of the effect of film frames. Even more radical was the Oxidation series (1978): Warhol and his assistants prepared canvases by covering the surfaces with copper paint and then urinated on them to make iridescent designs in yellows, oranges, and greens.

Warhol ran two television shows in the 1980s and worked in collaboration with various younger American and European artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Francesco Clemente. Resuming painting by hand, a process he had not used since the 1960s, he responded to a commission to produce a Last Supper.