Alex Da Corte: Hot Dog With Ketchup

This artwork is featured on the building facade on Gansevoort Street across from the Whitney and the High Line.

Alex Da Corte’s Hot Dog with Ketchup (2026) turns a familiar picture into an unruly encounter. Beginning with a printout of Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Hot Dog (1963), Da Corte paints ketchup across its surface in a loose, bodily sweep. The gesture is irreverent, but it also summons the drama of Jackson Pollock’s action painting, bringing Pop’s cool commercial image into contact with the heroic mark of Abstract Expressionism.

In Da Corte’s hands, art history is not preserved at a distance but drawn into the realm of appetite, desire, and play. This kind of collision is central to his practice, where familiar icons are made strange through acts of theatrical transformation. Hot Dog with Ketchup is a reproduction made messy, and unsettled, by touch. Lichtenstein himself returned to the topic in Hot Dog with Mustard and related works from 1963–64, making the subject a small but vivid part of his Pop vocabulary. Made partially in response to the hot dog vendors across the street, Da Corte’s version offers site-specific recognition of the vendors themselves, carrying this art historical exchange back into the public life of the street.

This billboard is created in conjunction with Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 11, 2026 and co-curated by Da Corte and Meg Onli, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator.

This project is made possible by the Whitney Museum of American Art, TF Cornerstone, and the High Line.

Alex Da Corte: Hot Dog with Ketchup is part of Outside of the Box programming, which is supported by a generous endowment from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation.

Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, New Jersey) is a Venezuelan American artist who lives and works in Philadelphia. His expansive practice has been the subject of major survey exhibitions including The Whale at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fresh Hell at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and Mr. Remember at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. His work has also been featured in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden Commission.

Da Corte has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Glenstone, the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Secession, the Hammer Museum’s Art + Practice, MASS MoCA, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In addition to his work as an artist, he has written longform catalogue essays for major touring exhibitions on Marisol and Ellsworth Kelly. He was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Recently, he co-curated, with Meg Onli, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first major museum exhibition of Lichtenstein in New York in more than thirty years.