DePaul Art Museum > Exhibitions > Andy Warhol: Photographs

Andy Warhol: Photographs

​March 29 – June 3, 2012​

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Photography was central to the life and work of American artist Andy Warhol (born Andrew Warhola, 1928–1987). Throughout his career, Warhol scrutinized the role photographs played in mediating our experience of the world, from creating celebrity and recording history or tragedy to marking moments of everyday life. His early paintings from the 1960s of celebrities (Marilyn, Elvis, and Jackie) and disasters (car crashes, riots, and suicides) drew on publicity and press photos as raw material in order to comment on and relish the public’s media-fueled obsession with looking.

Andy Warhol: Photographs, drawn from a donation by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to the DePaul Art Museum, considers two broad groups of photographs Warhol made in the last two decades of his life: color Polaroids that served as studies for paintings, and black-and-white snapshots that recorded his daily life. In photography, he found a way to engage with the high and low of American culture—the socialites and movie stars along with the banalities of consumer culture—recording reality while at the same time transforming it into something strange and fascinating.​