"I'm painting this way because I want to be a machine," commented Andy Warhol in 1963 about his way of working. Fuelled by the New York scene and central to Pop art, Warhol generated his own celebrity as well as massive amounts of artwork. Not only did he produce Brillo at his studio, known as The Factory, but also numerous series of prints, films, and music.

Warhol began his career in 1949 as a designer for Glamour magazine. He went on to create window displays, record jackets, and shoe ads, before making art that captured the interest of New York critics and curators. In much of his work, he adapted commercial production methods such as screen-printing, which he used in putting Brillo onto identical plywood boxes. These were one of a series of projects that replicated the original packaging of products such as DelMonte Peach Halves, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and Heinz Ketchup.

Andy Warhol shocked people with his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, coupled with such provocative statements as: "The reason I'm painting this way is because I want to be a machine." By taking his imagery from advertising and the mass media, Warhol attacked the separation of art from mass culture. Unlike the corrugated cardboard originals represented in "Brillo", these sculptures are made of wood. By making the cartons non-functional and uprooting them from their ordinary context, Warhol forces us to look at them freshly. They comment on the way that commercial packaging transforms a mundane, household product into a glamorous, desirable commodity. Warhol also focuses our attention on the significance of these objects as representatives of the impersonal, commercialized consumer society in which we live.