Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1928 – New York, New York, 1987) made circulation itself an artistic medium, using repetition, photography, screenprinting, and self-invention to examine how consumer objects, celebrities, and even individual people acquire, or lose, value as they move through the channels of mass reproduction.

Trained in commercial illustration, Warhol brought a career spent thinking about how pictures sell into fine art. He turned to photographic silkscreen printing in 1962, enlarging a photograph, transferring it onto silk, and inking across canvas; rather than simply erasing the artist's hand, the technique let him vary color and repetition endlessly while embracing the machine-made look he wanted, telling one interviewer, "I want to be a machine." Marilyn Diptych (1962), fifty repeated images of Marilyn Monroe made within weeks of her death, fading from bright color into smudged black and white, remains the clearest statement of how glamour and mortality moved through the same mechanical process for Warhol.

Warhol pursued the same logic across consumer packaging and catastrophe alike. Brillo Boxes (1963–64), silkscreened plywood replicas of supermarket cartons stacked like warehouse inventory, converted mass manufacture directly into sculpture, while his Death and Disaster paintings, car crashes, electric chairs, and race riots reproduced from news photographs, applied the same detached, repeated silkscreen to images no advertiser would choose; glamour and catastrophe, in Warhol's work, pass through the identical machinery of mass media.

The Factory, Warhol's New York studio, functioned as production line and social world at once, a network of collaborators and performers that generated both images and personalities. His film and video practice, more than four hundred works now held by the Andy Warhol Museum, used fixed cameras and extended duration to study screen presence, boredom, and performed identity, treating authorship as something delegated and shared rather than held by a single hand.

Long dismissed as a commercially compromised coda to the 1960s, Warhol's final two decades in fact sustained his central inquiry at real depth. The Skulls (1976) and Shadows (1978–79) turned his silkscreen process toward mortality and abstraction; the Oxidation paintings (1977–78) generated their surfaces through a chemical reaction between metallic paint and, literally, urine; and late series including Reversals, Rorschachs, Camouflage, and The Last Supper reworked his own earlier imagery and art history alike, extending his interrogation of authorship and value into new registers rather than repeating the achievements of his youth.

Warhol survived a near-fatal shooting in 1968 that altered his health and caution for the rest of his life. He left the bulk of his estate to found the Andy Warhol Foundation, which co-founded the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 1989, now home to more than 500,000 objects, and has since distributed some 52,000 works to over 320 museums worldwide, an institution that continues to do exactly what his art always did: put images, and the people who make them, into wider circulation.