NYC’s first major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective since 1993 now on view at the Whitney
Installation view of Roy Lichtenstein: Like New (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 11, 2026–May 10, 2027). Artwork © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com
New York’s first Roy Lichtenstein retrospective since 1993 opened at the Whitney Museum earlier this month, offering an up-close look at the Pop artist’s most famous works. “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” assembles 130 works created between the 1940s and 1990s and traces Lichtenstein’s fascination with images and how they are perceived. The exhibition also spills to the outdoors, with a recreated 32-foot-tall version of “Girl in Window” visible from the High Line and a towering “Coups de Pinceau” sculpture on the fifth-floor terrace. In today’s world of computer-created images, the exhibition celebrates the handmade nature of Lichtenstein’s paintings and prints and examines how images are duplicated and circulated.
The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation donated 400 works to the museum in 2018. In 2022, Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow, also gave his former studio building at 741/745 Washington Street to the Whitney with the intention of hosting its Independent Study Program.
Curated by Meg Onli and Alex Da Corte, “Like New,” titled after a 1962 work, features some of Lichtenstein’s most celebrated works, including “Look Mickey,” “Girl with Ball,” “Masterpiece,” “Drowning Girl,” “Happy Tears,” and “Little Big Painting.”
Da Corte, an artist who included new works of his own in the exhibition, recreated several pieces of Lichtenstein’s, including “Super Sunset Billboard” and “Girl in Window.” Colossal Media recreated “Greene Street Mural,” which measures 96 feet long.
The exhibition also includes a full-scale reconstruction of Lichtenstein’s first exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. The Whitney constructed an architectural facsimile of the gallery space, allowing visitors to experience the works together.
Lichtenstein took his images from comic books and advertisements and reconfigured them using “bold black outlines, flat bright colors, and fields of dots associated with commercial printing,” upending “conventional notions of what artwork could be,” as the museum notes.
“In an era when pictures are endlessly generated, copied, altered, filtered, and reposted across screens, Lichtenstein’s art is strikingly prescient and remarkably relevant,” according to the Whitney.
“He understood long before the digital age that images are never stable: they move through the world and return transformed. With each iteration, they are made ‘like new.'”
“Like New” is on view through May 10, 2027. Learn more about the exhibition here.
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