ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA,1928-New York, USA,1987). "Crosses,... Lot 45

ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburgh, USA,1928-New York, USA,1987). "Crosses, 1981. Polaroid photograph. Unique piece. Provenance: L'Elicottero", Lugano. Private collection. Rome. Museum glass. Signed in ink. Presents dry stamp with copyright of the artist. Measurements: 8.6 x 10.8 cm; 27 x 29 cm (frame). Warhol's relationship with religion has always been a subject of great debate and controversy. Throughout his artistic career he resorted on several occasions to Catholic-themed images, such as Jesus or "The Last Supper". It was in the early 1980s that he began to work with the idea of the cross as a symbol, playing with the dimensions and placement of the cross to explore the idea of crucifixion and sacrifice. This idea crystallised in the exhibition "Pistols, knives and crosses" held at the Galería Vijande in Madrid in 1982. Andrew Warhola, commonly known as Andy Warhol, was an American visual artist, filmmaker and music producer who played a crucial role in the birth and development of pop art. Considered in his time a guru of modernity, Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The son of Slovakian immigrants, he began studying art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1949. In the latter year, when he settled in New York, he began his career as an advertising cartoonist for various magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen and The New Yorker. At the same time he painted canvases whose subject matter was based on some element or image from the everyday environment, advertising or comics. He soon began to exhibit in various galleries. He progressively eliminated any expressionist traits from his works until he reduced them to a serial repetition of a popular element from mass culture, the world of consumerism or the media. This evolution reached its peak of depersonalisation in 1962, when he began to use a mechanical silkscreen printing process as a working method, by means of which he systematically reproduced myths of contemporary society, the most representative examples of which are the series dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Tse-tung, as well as his famous treatment of Campbell's soup cans, all works produced during the fruitful decade of the 1960s. This appropriationism, a constant in the work of the proponents of Pop Art, extended to universal works of art. Through mass reproduction, he succeeded in stripping the media fetishes he used of their usual referents, turning them into stereotypical icons with a purely decorative purpose, and in 1963 he set up the Factory, a workshop in which numerous figures from New York's underground culture gathered around him. The frivolity and extravagance that marked his way of life eventually established a coherent line between his work and his life. He is now represented in the most important contemporary art museums in the world, such as MoMA, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim in New York, the Fukoka Museum in Japan, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the National Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome, the MUMOK in Vienna, the SMAK in Ghent and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as in the museums that bear his name in Pittsburgh and Medzilaborce (Slovakia).