During his own lifetime ANDY WARHOL was considered the incarnation of the “pop” artist. Today this reputation is stronger than ever and Warhol’s artworks have been increasing in importance and value dramatically in recent years. Warhol made standardization the theme of his art and limited it to the distanced presentation of banal objects from the consumer and media worlds. His idols, like Marilyn and Mao, were not presented as human beings made of flesh and blood but as the products of a commercial world.
 
Following his most celebrated statement that “in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes”, Andy Warhol begun in the ‘60’s to produce photography derived paintings of famous people. He took faces from mass media, banal in their newspaper everydayness, and transformed them into paintings and prints, portraying in this fashion celebrities from arts and politics, contributing to the process of making them true icons of the 20th century.
 
After critics finally greeted his Factory as an appropriate artistic venue, the Warhol mania exploded in New York and all the fashionable, but still common, people wanted to redeem their 15 minutes of fame by getting their portrait depicted by Andy. The artist was in fact fascinated with the process of the “celebrification of nobodies” which marks the beginning of an era in which media attention became the new mirror of the individual’s self-perception.
 
"Everything is sort of artificial. I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts." A.W.
 
From June 2nd until June 24th, 2011 OLYVIA FINE ART will be exhibiting a wide selection of magnificent Andy Warhol portraits in Mayfair. The show is open to the public but RSVP is essential to book a private viewing appointment.