Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol's artistic work is closely linked to photography. The so-called ‘Prince of Pop’ was both photographer and model, he used templates from reportage and advertising for his pictures and captured travel impressions, stars and party people in his photographs. The camera was his constant companion: as a sketchpad, diary and means of communication. In the late 1960s, Warhol, who had trained as a commercial artist, developed a new process that he was able to use for portrait photography, in keeping with the aesthetic mood of ‘flower power’. This process allowed him to reduce the photographic image of the human face to the reproduction of a few features. The fact that the individuality of the face was reduced to an indispensable minimum and that the photographic template used as a medium remained visible did nothing to dampen the public's enthusiasm. These portrait photographs, mostly produced with the help of Warhol's Polaroids and only sparingly altered in terms of painting technique, were then fixed onto canvas with acrylic and serigraph ink in different colour variations. In this way, almost 1,000 portraits of well-known or unknown personalities were created.