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American painter, sculptor, designer, illustrator, director, writer and collector. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburg between 1945 and 1949 and moved to New York where he began working as a commercial artist and illustrator for magazines and newspapers. His work in the 50s, was attractive and, at times, eccentric and even in his originals there is a feel of them having being printed. He developed the "Blotted Line" technique, a first step towards other reproduction techniques such as screen printing. As from the 60s, Warhol concentrated fundamentally on painting. Motivated by a desire to become as well-known as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he began painting a series based on advertising images and comic strip stories. These were some of the first examples of Pop Art. Warhol was attracted to the shocking images of popular newspapers, to money and to the products of the consumer society, such as Coca-Cola bottles and cans of Campbell soup. After 1962, together with the group of artists in his New York studio, The Factory, he began to paint portraits of the famous as well as producing photographic works, films and music. He published the celebrity magazine Interview and organised television shows and multimedia concerts with the band, Velvet Underground. In 1968 he took part, for the first time, in a European exhibition and in documenta 4 in Kassel. In the same year, there was an attempt on his life and he was hospitalised for two months. At the end of his career, he used the work of great masters like Leonardo Da Vinci as reference points and supports for his own works. In 1989, he had two major retrospectives, one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, another at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Warhol is still considered the main and most controversial figure in Pop Art.

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