Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987)

When Andy Warhol started to imitate comic strips and advertisements in the early 1960s, trivial pictorial worlds were long since established in the art domain. Nevertheless, Warhol's works are simply likenesses, free of critical alienation and without the artist imposing his own creative will. For Warhol, with his training as a commercial artist, advertising and art were not in conflict. His Campbell's Soup Cans were provocative for this very reason. Extreme close-ups, powerfully contrasting forms, schematic simplification and serial compositions - all features of the commercial artist's work - are the stuff of Andy Warhol's early paintings, which to this day still stand as icons of Pop Art.