We can’t help it: Roy Lichtenstein is everywhere. From the pixels that make up on-screen images and the thick, brazen linework of even today’s greatest makers to the split-second shot of a tear-stained heroine, his impact is nearly impossible to shake.  It’s fast, it’s in your face. But how has his household comics-and-dots shorthand eclipsed a more complex story?

“Just because we can recognize something doesn’t mean we fully understand what it is,” said Meg Onli, one of the curators of Roy Lichtenstein: Like New. Opening at the Whitney Museum in New York on October 11, the show brings together over 130 works by the Pop master, including paintings, drawings, collages, prints, and sculptures, created over Lichtenstein’s six-decade career. And while its comic-inspired canvases are plenty, it also unearths lesser-known threads that resemble the artist, both as he saw himself and how his then-radical love for high-low would presciently play to the screen-happy realities of today’s audiences.

From the serious, and seriously strange, teachings of Hoyt Sherman at Ohio State University that would later prove formative to Lichtenstein’s outlook on the mark to works created in his last year of life, extending into the 1997 show just downstairs, Like New shines a light on the artist who understood the future of images and a deft appreciation for the eternal making and unmaking of meaning. The introductory, nearly 100-foot recreation of his “Greene Street Mural” (1983), one of four murals recreated by co-curator and artist Alex Da Corte’s studio, sets the tone right.

A historic highlight is a literal trip back to Lichtenstein’s New York: a gallery-within-a-gallery reconstruction of the artist’s 1962 debut solo at Leo Castelli gallery. It’s the first reunion of all the works since, down to “Laughing Cat” (1961), originally owned by Andy Warhol. Then lie some of his best-known heroines — “Drowning Girl” (1963), “Crying Girl” (1963), and “Girl in Window (Study for World’s Fair Mural)” (1963), also blown up to larger-than-life on the balcony outside. Beside them are near-identical reproductions and sources, like Elaine Sturtevant’s duplicate, for which Lichtenstein supplied the stencils. He even signed a Richard Pettibone painting as if it were the real deal. More than a copy, Lichtenstein loved a copy of a copy – an obsession that continues to be foundational for our contemporary culture of reposting, and the new associations an image accrues with every reshare.

“Slowing down the way that you look at Lichtenstein was our desire from the jump.” — Alex Da Corte

With brushstrokes so clean, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were machine-made, the conceptual richness of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, however, is often pushed in the shadow of his technical finesse (and if there was any doubt about Lichtenstein’s brand power, check out his recent Gap collection). “Slowing down the way that you look at Lichtenstein,” an artist celebrated for his immediacy, “was our desire from the jump,” Da Corte explained. “Emphatically handmade” is a descriptor continually echoed throughout the Whitney show, and within it, the hope of humanizing a relationship with works and restoring some of the personality into their touch.

Onli and Da Corte were admittedly not “Pop specialists” when they first took on Like New. Onli, who curated the Whitney’s 2024 Biennial, previously led Noah Davis’ Underground Museum, while Da Corte, a Venezuelan-American conceptual artist and 2019 Venice Biennale alum, is known for his immersive, color-saturated takes on American pop culture. But their experiences could play to a new generation of art appreciators, allowing them to contextualize Lichtenstein’s practice within previously unexplored territory. Like the stylish squirt of ketchup Da Corte adds on a riffed “Hot Dog” billboard across the street, they know how to play to their viewers’ taste, while daring us to understand the artist in a new light. Before doors opened, Onli and Da Corte talk us through the many dots within Like New, and how to connect them.

How did each of your unique backgrounds inform the curatorial approach?

Meg Onli: We did not come to Lichtenstein’s work as Pop specialists. We each have our areas of focus, so we really wanted to bring our own personal histories and interests as a way of seeing Lichtenstein differently.

Alex Da Corte: As an artist who is actively working in the studio, it felt important to locate and respect Roy and his work in the moment he was making it and find how he was speaking through his work. It became an essential thread for Meg and I in curating the show to understand and cite how he was putting words to the work in the time he was making it.

What are the challenges of curating an artist whose as ubiquitous Lichtenstein? What opportunities does it present?

Da Corte: The curious thing about Lichtenstein is that he is everywhere. His influence is all around us, even if we don’t know something we’re looking at could be from him at all. That was the challenge of making this show: it’s immediate, it’s fast, it’s graphic and bold. Yet his ideas around the work are very slow and conceptual and, frankly, very strange, as we’ve discovered. Slowing down the way that you look at Lichtenstein was our desire from the jump.

Onli: It really created an opportunity for Alex and I to look back and really get at some of those integral things that were operating beyond himself, or beyond the canvases. Some of those include early training at Ohio State University. He’s deeply interested in ideas of science; as early as ‘65, he starts talking about his dots in relationship to data. It’s not fully committed to the print narrative that we’ve consistently seen with an artist like him.

“It’s not fully committed to the print narrative that we’ve consistently seen with an artist like him.” — Meg Onli

Were there any unexpected threads or narratives that particularly resonated with you through this experience?

Onli: What the show does differently that other exhibitions haven’t done before is looking at how he could take source imagery — sometimes appearing in a newspaper, a comic book, or even an art history book — and not only increase it at the scale of canvases, but really get a sense of architectural scale. There are four hand-painted murals throughout the show. This was something that Alex and I felt very committed to bringing in and having as a unique experience to this exhibition.

Da Corte: Further to that point, Roy’s work was made by hand, so a lot of the time you see this work reproduced, it has a glossy finish; you cannot see that most of it has pencil marks, erasures, and palimpsests that are evident of his relationship to the making of the work. For me, that was a great discovery and something that still teaches about making and spending time with a work at all.

How has Lichtenstein sculpted our contemporary world of images and how we treat them?

Da Corte: We begin the exhibition with “Greene Street Mural.” This scroll of symbols and images that Roy deployed in 1983 is very much like our constant river of images that we experience on social media feeds. His tendency to layer and duplicate himself in his work and this idea of self-referentiality is innate to how we understand ourselves in relationship to the world and images today. The exhibition speaks to both that and younger audiences who live that way of communication.