Roy Lichtenstein

Born in 1923 and died in 1997 in New York, is arguably one of the most recognizable artists of the 20th century and a key figure of American Pop Art. Raised in Manhattan, as a teenager he attended painting classes at the Arts Students League, and obtained a degree in fine arts at Ohio State University. Although Lichtenstein is unambiguously associated with his interpretation of comics in the medium of painting, he also worked in sculpture, ceramics and lithography. His body of work, often reduced to the one aspect, drew upon a wide range of cultural and art historical sources; always exploring the possible exchanges between mass and high culture. In the aftermath of several exhibitions in Japan, including Japan World Expo in 1970, he became interested in East Asia and its imagery, starting with the lithography “Mao” (1971, one year before Andy Warhol’s serigraphs). The artist manifested a particular focus on themes from antiquity to modernity, also in his sculptures. His eclectic attitude incorporated minimal art tendencies (“Modern Sculpture with Three Discs”, 1967) and surrealism (“Surrealist Head”, 1986). In “Brushstrokes”, a series of paintings and sculptures executed since throughout his whole career, Lichtenstein commented on the legacy of abstract expressionism. Even though he started to exhibit in 1951, with the solo show at the Carlebach Gallery, he only came to the art world prominence in the early 1960s. As one of the Leo Castelli’s investments, in 1964, he partook “The American Supermarket” at the Bianchini Gallery in New York and “54–64: Painting and Sculpture of a Decade” at the Tate Gallery in London. Soon after, his first museum retrospective was organized by the Pasadena Art Museum. Today, his works are included in numerous public and museum displays, just to highlight the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago, the biggest collections of his work. More recently in 2023, his work was exhibited at the Maddox gallery in London, the Albertina Modern in Vienna and the Heather James Fine Art in California, USA.