This spring, Gagosian will open its 14th exhibition dedicated to Roy Lichtenstein. Titled “Painting with Scattered Brushstrokes,” the exhibition draws exclusively from the Lichtenstein family collection and will feature paintings, sculpture, watercolors, and works on paper from the 1970s and ’80s.
Opening March 19 at the gallery’s 541 West 24th Street space, the show lands in the middle of a frenzied run of market activity for the late Pop artist, alongside a major Whitney Museum retrospective for Lichtenstein opening later this year.
Last April, Sotheby’s announced a consignment of more than 40 works from the artist’s family, estimated above $35 million. In September, it staged a dedicated single-owner sale of more than 90 works from the Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein Collection. Then in November, as part of the house’s contemporary evening sale, it sold eight works from the collection, achieving $20.7 million and a 100 percent sell-through rate. In total, Sotheby’s sold nearly $150 million worth of art by Lichtenstein.
The Gagosian show focuses on a motif that Lichtenstein would return to again and again: the brushstroke. In the 1960s, with Abstract Expressionism fully established and the gesture of a sweeping brushstroke carrying near-mythic status, Lichtenstein began painting such mark-making as images in their own right. He flattened them, outlined them, turned them into symbols. What had been a spontaneous mark became a classic Lichtenstein image.
By the 1970s and ’80s, he returned to the motif with renewed clarity. The brushstroke becomes both subject and commentary. In these later works, the mark is bold, graphic, and deliberate; so meticulously composed they look almost mechanical.
Stefan Ratibor, Gagosian’s managing director, said the gallery has seen “incredible interest in his work at all levels” over the past year, especially in advance of the Whitney show, which will be the museum’s first major survey of the artist in more than two decades.
The Whitney has for years played a central role in his legacy, with his foundation having donated more than 400 works to the museum over the years as well as his widow, Dorothy, gifting Roy’s studio to the museum in 2022 to serve as home for its Independent Study Program. Having first shown in the 1965 Whitney Annual, Lichtenstein also had an important mid-career survey at the Whitney in 1981. That show was held in the Breuer building, the same building Sotheby’s used for its recent November sales. That kind of symmetry tends to resonate with collectors (and marketing people).
As for why the family has brought so much material to market in a concentrated period, the gallery says the answer is practical. The estate had financial obligations that needed to be met, and worked with Sotheby’s to select works that would likely have strong results at auction.
Ratibor also emphasized that the upcoming exhibition is not a rerun of what has appeared at auction, but conceived as a complement. The gallery mounted its first Lichtenstein solo show in 1998, and in the dozen exhibitions has focused on different facets of his oeuvre. In focusing on a defining motif in Lichtenstein’s visual language, alongside the strong auction results and Whitney retropsective, Gagosian aims to keep the artist firmly in view.
