Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol .(August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.Warhol's art encompassed many forms of media, including hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was also a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1984, two years before his death. Warhol showed a great deal of interest in the Chinese political situation in 1971: “I have been reading so much about China. They’re so nutty. They don’t believe in creativity. The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong. It’s great. It looks like a silkscreen”. The following year he created a portrait of the communist leader based on a photograph from his famous Little Red Book – ‘The thoughts of Chairman Mao’. Like many of his 1970s portraits, Warhol’s Mao paintings are much more painterly than his Pop works of the 1960s with strong, colourful brushwork clearly visible. This poster is for a Warhol exhibition at the Hokin Gallery, Chicago. The show opened in 1977, the year the Cultural Revolution in China officially ended following Mao’s death in 1976. Yayoi Kusama (born in March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media,including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the popart, minimalist and feminist artmovements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde. "Pumpkin RB-B" (2004) is an exciting and highly sought-after silkscreen in colors by famous avant-garde Japanese female artist Yayoi Kusama (Japan, b. 1929). This print is edition 25 of 80 measuring 13 x 15.15 inches (33 x 38.50 cm) unframed, is professionally framed to larger dimensions and in excellent condition. Pumpkins have been one of Kusama’s preferred subjects since the 1980s, recurring with such frequency as to function as a kind of avatar for the artist. In describing their personal significance, she has remained characteristically elusive, saying only, "I like the essential repetitive form of pumpkins…They're like everything else I do but at the same time very humorous.” In this print, Kusama employs two of her other signature forms, dots and the 'infinity net'. Kusama has used dots to a variety of effects in her work, employing them for their cosmic symbolism, their modeling capabilities, and the overall cathartic experience found in the obsessive mark making. Kusama applies black dots in various sizes to a brilliant red pumpkin here to suggest formal and tonal gradation, the visual effects of the radiating dots enhance the visual three-dimensional illusion in marked contrast to her two-dimensional 'infinity-net' pattern which obsessively fills the space around the pumpkin.  In 1993, Kusama represented Japan in the 45th Venice Biennale. Since then, she became famous for her works on pumpkins and was invited to create large installations, such as the outdoor sculpture at Fukuoka Municipal Museum. The subject of "pumpkins" came from her childhood. During the war, her family planted pumpkins at home. She said, "As a child, I used to play in the garden at home. The pumpkins that I plucked out would talk to me." "Pumpkins have such lovely shapes... What attracts me are their unpowdered big bellies and their strong sense of security." Kusama has a partiality for dots due to her hallucinatory visions. She covers the surfaces of all kinds of materials – walls, floors, canvases, objects, human bodies, and even herself – in dots. And by expanding dots into infinity through repeated lines, her work confounds the existence of real space, bringing the viewers into unconscious states of dizziness, not knowing whether they are in reality or illusions. This painting, "Red Pumpkin", composed of repeating dots, combines two of her most iconic symbols – "pumpkins" and "infinity nets." Roy Lichtenstein born 1923 [- 1997] American Pop artist; painter, lithographer and sculptor. Born in New York. Studied at the Art Students League 1939, and at Ohio State College 1940-3. War service 1943-6. Returned to Ohio State College 1946-9, and taught there until 1951. First one-man exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery, New York, 1951. Lived in Cleveland, Ohio 1951-7, painting and making a living at various odd jobs. Instructor at New York State University, Oswego, New York 1957-60, and at Rutgers University 1960-3. Painted in a non-figurative and Abstract Expressionist style 1957-61, but began latterly to incorporate loosely handled cartoon images, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck etc., in his paintings. Made a breakthrough into his characteristic work in 1961; painted pictures based on comic strip images, advertising imagery and overt adaptations of works of art by others, followed by classical ruins, paintings of canvas backs or stretchers, etc. Made land, sea, sky and moonscapes in 1964, sometimes in relief and incorporating plastics and enamelled metal. His later work includes some sculptures, mostly in polished brass, based on Art-Deco forms of the 1930s, etc. Lives in New York. An exhibition by Roy Lichtenstein will be held in collaboration with the Tate Modern Galley and  the Art Institute of Chicago from 21th February to 27th May 2013. This exhibition promises to be the first major retrospective in the last twenty years, showing together 125 of his most important paintings and sculptures. Besides Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) is one of the central figures of American Pop Art. In the early 1960s, he pioneered a new style of hand-painting, inspired by the processes of industrial printing as well as the images of comics and advertising. The exhibition presents famous paintings and the monumental series produced in 1973-1974.  In addition to the "classics", the exhibition represents the entire path of the Lichtenstein's artistic research, beginning with the early works and those related to some of the most significant European tendencies, such as Expressionism, Futurism and Surrealism, and ending with the latest series of female nudes and Chinese landscapes. Lichtenstein's artwork is made of a wide range of materials, from Rowlux to steel, including ceramic and brass, together with a selection of unpublished drawings, collages and paper works: the communal purpose is to express both visual power and intellectual accuracy.  Dutch pioneer of abstract art, who developed from early landscape pictures to geometric abstract works of a most rigorous kind. Born in Amersfoort, Utrecht. Studied painting at the Amsterdam Academy 1892-4 and again, part-time, 1896-7. Friendship with the painter Simon Mans and painted landscapes in the Hague School tradition. Began to work in a more vividly coloured and sometimes pointillist style in 1908, joined the Theosophic Organisation in 1909 and made some works of a Symbolist character. First one-man exhibition with C.R.H. Spoor and Jan Sluyters at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1909. Lived in Paris 1912-14; was influenced by Cubism, which he carried to the point of abstraction. Returned to Holland in 1914 and step by step evolved a more simplified abstract style which he called Neo-Plasticism, restricted to the three primary colours and to a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white ground; associated with van Doesburg in the de Stijl movement 1917-25. Lived 1919-38 in Paris where he joined the group Abstraction-Création in 1931. Moved to London 1938-40, living near Gabo and Ben Nicholson, then in 1940 to New York where he started to develop a more colourful style, with coloured lines and syncopated rhythms. Died in New York. His most celebrated image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapted a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' All-American Men of War. The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering "Whaam!"and the boxed caption "I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..." This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m (5 ft 7 in x 13 ft 4 in). Whaam follows the comic strip-based themes of some of his previous paintings and is part of a body of war-themed work created between 1962 and 1964. It is one of his two notable large war-themed paintings. It was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1966, after being exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1963, and (now at the Tate Modern) has remained in their collection ever since. Composition with Gray and Light Brown  1918; Oil on canvas, 80.2 x 49.9 cm; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas  Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue  1921; Oil on canvas, 39 x 35 cm