The Whitney Museum of American Art will stage one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of Roy Lichtenstein’s work in decades this autumn, bringing together more than 130 works to explore why one of Pop Art’s defining figures feels more relevant than ever in an age of endlessly shared and manipulated images.
Opening on 11th October 2026, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New spans six decades of the artist’s career, from the early 1940s through to the 1990s. Rather than presenting another survey of Lichtenstein’s iconic comic-book paintings, the exhibition repositions his practice around ideas that have become increasingly significant in the twenty-first century: image circulation, duplication, authorship and the instability of visual culture.
Across painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture and film, the exhibition argues that Lichtenstein anticipated today’s image economy long before the arrival of social media. His practice transformed the visual language of comics, advertising and commercial printing into works that questioned how images are copied, reproduced and continually remade.
Among the exhibition’s highlights are many of Lichtenstein’s best-known works, including Look Mickey (1961), Girl with Ball (1961), Masterpiece (1962), Drowning Girl (1963), Happy Tears (1964) and Artist’s Studio “The Dance” (1974). The Whitney will also reunite, for the first time, all eight paintings from the artist’s landmark 1962 debut at Leo Castelli Gallery, reconstructing the original installation that helped establish Lichtenstein as a leading figure in American Pop Art.
The exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls with the recreation of three large-scale murals, including a nearly 96-foot-long version of Greene Street Mural (1983), while artist and guest curator Alex Da Corte will realise an outdoor presentation of Girl in Window (1964). Works by Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone and Sturtevant further examine Lichtenstein’s lasting influence on artists exploring appropriation, copying and the afterlife of images.
Organised by Whitney curator Meg Onli together with guest curator Alex Da Corte, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New presents the artist not simply as a pioneer of Pop Art, but as an artist whose ideas about image culture anticipated many of the visual conditions that define contemporary life. As pictures are continually cropped, reposted and recirculated online, the exhibition suggests Lichtenstein’s work has acquired a new urgency.
You can now purchase timed tickets for
Roy Lichtenstein: Like New HERE
