b. 1928 Pittsburgh, d. 1987 New York

Andy Warhol studied in his native Pittsburgh and began his career as a fashion illustrator in New York. Warhol became a major proponent of pop art in the early 1960s and his images of movie stars, disasters, flowers, skulls, Maos, race riots and Americana became iconic images of the twentieth century. He also worked prolifically as a filmmaker, photographer, producer, publisher and diarist. The Electric Chair series of paintings was begun in late 1963, at the same time as his Suicides series. The artist’s 1971 reprise of Electric Chairs, seen at Brighton Photo Biennial 2006 in a series of screen-prints from the Tate collection, took place during the same year as his first Tate Gallery retrospective, in which Warhol's work was revealed to the British public in substantial form for the first time. Warhol survived a murder attempt in 1968 and died in 1987 from complications of routine gallbladder surgery.