Roy Lichtenstein, the master of Pop Art, is 100 years old. The ALBERTINA Museum is celebrating the artist with a comprehensive retrospective that brings together over 90 paintings, sculptures and prints.
Thanks to generous loans from 30 lenders – international museums and private collectors – the most important works from his extensive oeuvre will travel to Vienna from all over the world, including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery, Washington, the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Louisiana Museum, Humblebaek, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
The idea for this exhibition was born together with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation on the occasion of a generous donation of around 100 works to the ALBERTINA Museum. Roy Lichtenstein is known for his clichéd blondes, war heroes and comic figures with speech bubbles. With bright, vibrant colors, clear lines and the characteristic Ben-Day dots that imitated the cheap printing technique of comics, he made his mark on the American art scene in the 1960s with his cartoon aesthetic.
The exhibition starts with the early works of the 1960s, including two icons of this era: Look Mickey and Popeye, which will be on display together for the first time in decades. The exhibition also presents Lichtenstein’s iconic paintings of product advertising objects in black and white, as well as landscapes in enamel technique and art-by-art pictures after Picasso, Dalì, Kirchner and Pollock. A particular highlight is a huge brushstroke sculpture that leaves the canvas and conquers the room.
Together with Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein is one of the most influential and important American artists of the 20th century. This exhibition was realized with the support of and in collaboration with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and the Roy Lichtenstein Estate.