Lichtenstein, Roy

Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York, where he died in 1997. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. In all of Lichtenstein’s art there remains a particular, unmistakably American quality: a knowing and laconic examination of the world that separated him from his Capitalist Realist contemporaries in Europe, who also borrowed from pop cultural sources. His mixing of text and image, and of high and low culture, as well as his strategies involving the appropriated image, continues to be a rich source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artists, from Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and Raymond Pettibon to John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton.

Recent retrospective surveys include the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek (2003), which travelled to the Hayward Gallery, London, the Reina Sofia, Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2004) and at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005). The Art Institute of Chicago hosted a major Lichtenstein retrospective in 2012.