Roy Lichtenstein: Modern Paintings

Richard Gray Gallery - New York is pleased to announce ROY Lichtenstein MODERN PAINTINGS, an exhibition of major paintings executed in 1967, drawn from private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Lichtenstein’s Modern Paintings series includes over 60 paintings and accompanying drawings and has never before been the subject of a major exhibition. This exhibition was organized in conjunction with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

Concurrent with ROY LICHTENSTEIN MODERN PAINTINGS, Richard Gray Gallery has published the first scholarly catalogue of these works, which includes a comprehensive checklist of the entire series, images of Roy Lichtenstein in his studio by photographer Ugo Mulas and text by Dave Hickey, an excerpt of which is below:

“Today, finally, even the hegemony of “culture” is dissolving into the global melting pot and we’re back to the issue of what’s good and what’s bad, regardless. This leaves paintings like Lichtenstein’s Modern Paintings alive in the eternal present as singular confrontational objects. You hang them on your wall and they set a standard. They don’t give themselves up or let you go. You only look away out of cowardice, never out of boredom."
- Dave Hickey

About the Modern Paintings Series:
In 1966, Roy Lichtenstein moved on from his much-celebrated imagery of the early 1960s, away from cartoons and brushstrokes, and began to make compositions that resist easy classification. Using his characteristic Ben Day dots and geometric shapes and lines, Lichtenstein rendered incongruous, challenging images out of familiar architectural structures, patterns borrowed from Art Deco and other subtly evocative, often sequential, motifs.