ROY LICHTENSTEIN. MULTIPLE VISIONS, Mudec, Milan, 01/05/2019 – 08/09/2019

Roy Lichtenstein come to the Museum of Cultures of Milan with the exhibition “Roy Lichtenstein. Multiple Visions”, from the 1st May to the 8th September 2019. His sophisticated art that can be recognized at first sight and apparently easy to understand, has fascinated right from the first heroic years of pop art generations of creatives, from painting to advertising, from photography to design and fashion and the seductive power that it exercises on contemporary visual culture is still very strong.

Reflections on Crash, 1990 ©Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

The exhibition showed about 100 works between prints, even of large size, sculptures, tapestries, a wide selection of editions coming from prestigious museums, institutions, and private European and American collections (the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, the National Gallery of Art of Washington, the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, the Carmignac Foundation and the Ryobi Foundation, Gemini G.E.L. Collection), as well as videos and photographs.

“Roy Lichtenstein. Multiple Visions” has been curated by Gianni Mercurio and promoted by the Comune
di Milano-Cultura and by 24 ORE Cultura-Gruppo 24 ORE, which was also the producer,
according to the design by MADEINART.

The exhibition revealed, through a general outline of the themes and genres of Roy Lichtenstein’s art, how the elements of different cultures merge with his work of deconstruction and reconstruction of the image, and then developed from a pop point of view with his very personal language: from the story of the birth
of the United States to the heroic deeds of the Far West, from the vernaculars and the ethnographic artistic expressions of the native Americans to the pop culture which exploded following the expansion of world economy of the second postwar period, from the European artistic culture of the avant-gardes to the contemplative spirit of oriental landscapes.

Landscape with Boats, 1996 ©Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

His fascination with the “printed form”, that is the mechanical reproduction as a source of inspiration, which is at the basis of Roy Lichtenstein’s work and which he carried out in his painting along a path that started from a copy which was transformed into an original, is
presented in this exhibition in its reverse process: from an original idea to a multiplied copy. A search conducted by the artist along his entire career through print and manufacturing, realizing works devised for the purpose (the realization of a print or a sculpture started from preparatory drawings and studies, just like his paintings) and using innovative techniques and materials; a practice which became a form of artistic expression and an extension of his aesthetic vision, built methodically by Lichtenstein in parallel with his painting and of which the exhibition presents the evolution starting from his early works in the Fifties.

Reverie, 1965 ©Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

The exhibition was organized in a thematic itinerary, highlighting Lichtenstein’s evolution in work compared to the mechanical reproducibility of the work of art, of which he was maybe the most sophisticated interpreter, but illustrating at the same time his various formal interpretations and representations regarding the subjects treated: visions that proceed with constant trans-historical references to the changes in artistic languages.

“Roy Lichtenstein. Multiple Visions” was curated by Gianni Mercurio, a scholar of Lichtenstein for over twenty years. Mercurio curated, among others, the exhibition and relevant volume “Roy Lichtenstein. Meditations on Art”, Milan, Fondazione La Triennale, 2010, and then (with the title “Kunst als Motiv”) Köln, Museum Ludwig, 2011.