This fall, the Whitney Museum of American Art will open “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” a survey of more than 130 works tracing the artist’s career from the early 1940s through the 1990s, opening on October 11th.
Organized by curator Meg Onli with artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator, the exhibition moves beyond Lichtenstein’s Pop-era surfaces to focus on his preoccupation with how images are copied, enlarged, circulated, and altered as they travel. Spanning painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture, and film, the show promises a fresh look at one of the 20th century’s defining names.
Notably, the exhibition will reunite all eight works from Lichtenstein’s 1962 debut at Leo Castelli Gallery for the first time. The exhibition also includes recreations of three murals, among them a nearly 96-foot-long iteration of Greene Street Mural (1983), and an outdoor presentation of Girl in Window (1964) realized by Da Corte.
The checklist draws on Lichtenstein’s best-known paintings, including Look Mickey (1961), Drowning Girl (1963), Happy Tears (1964), and Artist’s Studio ‘The Dance’ (1974). The Whitney show also features artists who absorbed Lichtenstein’s ideas about copying and authorship, including Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone, and Sturtevant.
The exhibition frames Lichtenstein’s images as newly relevant in an age of digital cropping, filtering, and reposting. It will argue that the artist understood that pictures are unstable well before digital circulation made that condition universal.
“Like New” arrives amid a broader wave of institutional attention to Lichtenstein. The Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center are jointly presenting “Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio” through mid-August, while the Guggenheim Museum’s “Guggenheim Pop” remains on view through January 2027.
Timed tickets for “Like New” are on sale now; member previews run October 8th through 10th ahead of the public opening.
