A square in the Zakarpattya region of the Western Ukraine has been renamed after Andy Warhol as part of the decommunisation process taking place in the region. The American artist who is of Ukrainian descent is known as one of the founders of pop-art. Warhol’s Ukrainian background, according to Wikipedia shows his parents were Rusyns from the town of Miko, now Mikova, in what is now Slovakia but was, when they emigrated to the United States, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Warhol himself was born in Pittsburgh in 1928.
Seven streets in five villages in the region have also been renamed in honour of Ukrainian artists and activists. All of them lived in the region and contributed to its development. The Ukrainian parliament passed a law which orders the renaming of around two hundred villages and towns. According to Ukraine Today, “Thousands of Soviet monuments are set to be dismantled as well. Recently, a 20-metre statue of Lenin was toppled in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhya. It stood in the city center for more than 50 years. Overall about 800 monuments dedicated to Lenin were taken down in the past two years.” The first demolitions coincided with the pro-EU Maidan protests against Moscow-backed former President Viktor Yanukovych.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is widely regarded as a defining figure not only of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s but of an entire cultural era. He worked prodigiously across a vast range of media, including painting,photography, print-making, drawing, sculpture, film (sixty experimental films between 1963 and 1968), photography, print-making, drawing, sculpture, film (sixty experimental films between 1963 and 1968), television (“Andy Warhol’s TV,” 1982 and “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes,” 1986), publishing (Interview magazine and various books), happenings, and performances. He also endorsed products, appeared in advertisements and made business deals, giving new currency to the philosophical and practical interplay between art as a reflection upon society and art as a product of society.
1960 marked a turning point in Warhol’s prolific career. He painted his first works based on comics and advertisements, enlarging and transferring the source images onto his canvases with an opaque projector. In 1961, Warhol showed his paintings, Advertisement, Little King, Superman, Before and After, and Superman, Before and After, and Saturday’s Popeye in a window display of Bonwit Teller department store. Appropriating images from popular culture, Warhol created many paintings that remain icons of 20th-century art including the Campbell’s Soup Can, Marilyn and Elvis series. In 1962, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited his Campbell’s Soup Cans and in New York, the Stable gallery showed the Baseball, Coca-Cola, Do It Yourself and Dance Diagram paintings among others. In 1963 Warhol established a studio at 231 East 47th Street which became known as the “Factory.”