LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF ART, Denmark
22 August 2003 - 11 January 2004

HAYWARD GALLERY, London
26 February - 16 May 2004

MUSEO NATIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFIA, Madrid
24 June - 27 September 2004

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART , San Francisco
October 23, 2004 - February 22, 2005

The exhibition focuses on Lichtenstein's imagery, as it developed from the 1960s to his death in 1997, in the paintings and works on paper, and seeks to counter the relatively timebound view of Lichtenstein as just a Pop artist. It fuses genres and series through which Lichtenstein worked over years, positioning the Pop works of the early 1960s with the work of the following decades, and revealing them as a continuum. In so doing, it locates Lichtenstein's originality less in the novelty of Pop art than in the sustained and complex interrogation of the nature of the painted image in the modern world which he pursued with integrity and inventiveness over thirty years. Lichtenstein emerges, through this, as an classical artist, whose faith in the potential of painting to convey something specific and important survived even his own penetrating analysis of its limits, as well as its possibilities. Such an achievement has, surely, much to tell a new generation of artists, as well as a new public encountering the range of Lichtenstein's paintings for the first time

Susan Ferleger Brades
Director, Hayward Gallery