Andy Warhol: The man who turned trash into art

Andy Warhol was a man who could turn a trash can into a work of art. He was an artist who thrived in an era when everything was rapidly consumed and forgotten, and when art itself began to take on new forms.

All it took was for him to pick up a basket filled with empty cans, outdated stamps, or crumpled papers, and he would transform them into something with value and meaning. This was the beginning of Warhol’s cultural legend as one of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century, a pop art painter who created some of the most iconic posters and images inspired by American consumer culture.

He lived in a four-story house, but even that wasn’t enough space, so he added a storage room where he collected discarded items and junk that others had thrown away. As a “trash picker,” this impoverished young man, who had immigrated to the U.S. with his parents, became one of the most famous and influential icons of 20th-century art. He was enigmatic and brilliant, so fascinated by everyday waste that he managed to turn it into art with philosophical interpretations that summarized the human condition of the 20th century.

Andy was the third child in a family of Slovak immigrants. At around eight years old, he contracted a serious neurological disease that kept him confined at home for long periods. To compensate for this, Andy’s mother, a talented artist herself, taught him the art of drawing, nurturing his artistic interests and sharp intellect. She bought him his first camera at the age of nine, and Andy carried it with him, trying to capture everything that caught his eye. He was deeply engaged in painting and also collected photographs of celebrities.

After graduating from high school, Andy Warhol enrolled at Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he specialized in “pictorial design.” This education introduced him to new printing methods that would later become the hallmark of his illustrations. After finishing college in 1949, Warhol quickly gained fame for using these methods in various advertising campaigns. His works included shoe advertisements, Christmas cards, and numerous book illustrations.

In the early 1950s, Andy decided to slightly alter his last name from Warhola to Warhol and presented himself to the public as a serious artist with experience in commercial art, deeply immersed in American pop culture. In 1952, Andy held his first solo exhibition in New York at the Museum of Modern Art and later participated in his first group exhibition in 1956. Warhol’s work caught the attention of many contemporary and emerging artists due to the unique perspective he offered.

Warhol then began using paper, leaflets, and gift wrap, turning them into patterns that more closely reflected the content of modern American consumer life. In his works from this period, one could see the influence of abstract expressionism.

However, in later works such as Brillo Boxes (1964), we see a clear shift from abstract expressionism towards pop art. In 1961, Warhol began his “pop art” exhibitions, which were based on drawing covers of commercial products like soap, ice cream, and more.

Warhol became famous for using modern drawing techniques, such as a device that enlarged reflected photographs onto a canvas hanging on the wall. Only after this process did he transfer the drawing to the canvas without sketching the elements in pencil first, making the work more like a painting than a graphic design.

The Campbell’s Soup Cans series once again highlighted him as an extraordinary figure. Warhol painted a soup can as an alternative to traditional painting, as an expression of consumerism that dominated not only American society but also the world of art.

One of Warhol’s most famous works is his depiction of Marilyn Monroe across multiple prints, with each print assigned a dominant color, such as Marilyn Monroe Gold, Bronze, Violet, and so on. The purpose of these works was to commemorate Marilyn after her sudden death from a barbiturate overdose in August 1962. According to Warhol, after Monroe became a symbol of American mass culture, she was like any other product on a store shelf. After her death, there was an obsession with her photographs in America, which spread across newspapers and magazines.

In addition to his popular images, Warhol created about 600 films between 1963 and 1976, ranging from a few minutes to 24 hours in length. The iconic images for which he became famous, alongside these films, made him one of the most recognized pop artists of the 20th century. His work combined both celebration and critique of consumer culture, and to this day, they remain among the most expensive artworks in the world.