Roy Lichtenstein: Like New

Roy Lichtenstein changed the way we see images. One of the defining artists of the Pop art movement, he turned the visual language of mass culture, comics, advertising, consumer goods, and commercial printing into some of the most recognizable images of the twentieth century. His work looked cool, crisp, and machine-made, but was meticulously handmade, revealing an artist fascinated by how images are built, copied, enlarged, circulated, and made new.

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New offers a bold reconsideration of Lichtenstein for the present. Bringing together roughly 130 works made from the early 1940s through the 1990s, the exhibition traces how his early interest in perception and visual recognition shaped a career-long investigation into duplication, simulation, and image culture. Across painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture, and film, Lichtenstein treated 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). It also includes a recreation of three murals, including a nearly 96-foot long iteration of Greene Street Mural (1983). Roy Lichtenstein: Like New also reunites, for the first time, all the works from Lichtenstein’s first exhibition of Pop-style work at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. This pivotal moment for the artist would come to define an era with its impact extending far beyond Pop, shaping generations of artists, including Louise Lawler , Richard Pettibone , and Sturtevant whose work will also be on view in this exhibition and further illuminate 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.

About the artist

Roy Fox Lichtenstein ( LIK-tən-STYN ; October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American artist. A leading figure of the Pop Art movement, he is best known for his large-scale paintings inspired by comic books, advertisements, and mass-produced imagery. Lichtenstein's art is represented in major museum collections worldwide, and he remains one of the most influential and recognizable artists of the 20th century.