More than any other artist of his generation, Warhol showed us that the ubiquitous imagery of mass culture had come to reflect and shape contemporary life. Coca-Cola bottles, newspaper photographs of car crashes and of the death chamber are as closely associated with Warhol as they are with America. This powerful subject matter, however, has often obscured his radical explorations into different media. He painted and drew with silkscreen, made moving film images appear still, stitched together identical photographs, and filled a room with silver balloons.

Warhol described his approach as 'machine-like', but his work was far from uniform. He created an art of endless permutation, reinventing the same images again and again. This aspect is emphasised in the galleries' thematic groupings. We have also added an expanded section on Warhol's abstractions. Usually seen as a late career development, his interest in abstraction can be traced back to his earliest works. Indeed, all of Warhol's paintings can be experienced as a late-twentieth-century simulated landscape in which everything is surface and nothing but surface. Through this mediated world, Warhol gave form to the myths - aesthetic, sexual, cultural, political and economic - that continue to fuel contemporary life.

This exhibition was first shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin where it was curated by Heiner Bastian. The Tate Modern presentation is curated by Donna De Salvo.