The Whitney Museum of American Art presents “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” opening October 11. This exhibition brings together over 130 works made from the early 1940s through the 1990s and offers a bold reconsideration of one of the defining artists of the Pop art movement and the twentieth century. Tracing Lichtenstein’s career-long investigation into duplication, perception, simulation, authorship, and image culture, “Like New” reveals an artist who understood that images are never fixed but instead continually copied, enlarged, circulated, and made new.
Roy Lichtenstein changed the way we see images. Turning the visual language of mass-culture comics, advertising, consumer goods, and commercial printing into fine art, Lichtenstein produced works that looked cool, crisp, and machine-made but were meticulously handmade. “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” looks beyond the artist’s iconic surfaces to trace how his early interest in perception and visual recognition shaped a career-long inquiry into the power and stability of images. Across painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture, and film, the exhibition presents Lichtenstein’s images as unstable forms that could be borrowed, translated, reframed, and transformed.
The exhibition features many of Lichtenstein’s most celebrated works, including “Look Mickey” (1961), “Girl with Ball” (1961), “Masterpiece” (1962), “Drowning Girl” (1963), “Happy Tears” (1964), “Little Big Painting” (1965), “Rouen Cathedral, Set III” (1968–69), and Artist’s Studio “The Dance” (1974).
Among its highlights, “Like New” reunites for the first time all eight works from Lichtenstein’s landmark 1962 Pop debut at Leo Castelli Gallery. The exhibition reconstructs the intimate gallery setting, allowing visitors to experience the works together as audiences did at a pivotal moment in American art history.
The exhibition also includes the recreation of three murals, including a nearly 96-foot-long iteration of “Greene Street Mural” (1983) and an outdoor presentation of “Girl in Window” (1964) realized by artist and co-curator Alex Da Corte. The impact of Lichtenstein’s work extended far beyond Pop, shaping generations of artists, including Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone, and Sturtevant, whose work will also be on view to further illustrate Lichtenstein’s relationship to copying, influence, appropriation, and the afterlife of images.
In an era when pictures are endlessly cropped, filtered, reposted, and recirculated, Lichtenstein’s work feels newly urgent. “Like New” looks beyond the artist’s iconic surfaces to reveal the power and instability of images and celebrate an artist who understood, long before the digital age, that images change as they move through the world.