To mark the 100th birthday of the most famous US pop art artist alongside Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, the Albertina is dedicating an extensive retrospective to Roy Lichtenstein with 100 works from all of his creative periods.
The National Gallery, Washington, the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, New York, the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Tate London and other important museums have made works available for the exhibition round out the Albertina’s holdings in terms of content.
In 2023, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation liquidated a large part of its own holdings and handed them over to the Whitney Museum, New York, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and also the Albertina in Vienna.
The “Centennial Exhibition” shows the large comic paintings that caused a lot of conversation, incomprehension and protest when they were created in the 1960s, as well as designs for fountains and sculptures in public spaces, high-gloss enamel signs and carpets , sketchbooks and preliminary drawings. For many visitors, the first look at the originals will come as a surprise.
The sheer size of the paintings, some three by six meters – as in the late work “Bath Scene with Starfish” from 1995 – the precision of the dots (Ben Day Dots) that are so typical of Roy Lichtenstein, individually placed with a brush or created with stencils. and hatching, the colors of the works amaze the viewer. For the young visitors to the exhibition, the walk through the Basteihalle of the Albertina becomes a selfie marathon. The exhibition’s curators Gunhild Bauer and Serena Ligas (assistant) have succeeded in showing Roy Lichtenstein’s development in a comprehensible way, allowing for the physical proximity between the viewer and the works of art, and creating a fascination for one of the most popular representatives of Pop Art.
Toni Scholz
•Until July 14th, Albertina Vienna, Albertinaplatz 1, open daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday and Friday until 9 p.m
•Catalogue “Roy Lichtenstein: A Centennial Exhibition” from Prestel, 240 pages, 45 euros
•The exhibition by US documentary photographer Joel Sternfeld runs parallel until April 28th
