MUDEC takes a look at America and at one of its most important artistic icons of the 20th century, Roy Lichtenstein, with the exhibition 'Roy Lichtenstein. Multiple Visions'.
The exhibition presents over 80 works including prints, sculptures and tapestries in a broad selection of editions from leading museums, institutions and private European and American collections (including the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Ileana Sonnabend Collection, the Lilja Collection, etc.), as well as videos and photographs.
'Roy Lichtenstein. Multiple Visions', curated by Gianni Mercurio and staged by the Comune di Milano-Cultura and 24 ORE Cultura-Gruppo 24 ORE, which is also the producer, presents visitors with a panorama of the themes and artistic phases that this American pop artist explored from the 1950s to the 1990s, offering a broad overview of his work from the post-war period to the end of the Cold War: from cultures to oriental landscapes, from women to nudes, from interiors to still lifes and abstract paintings, with particular attention to the evolution of the artistic form of expression known as printmaking, a technique that Lichtenstein studied and practised from the start to the finish of his career.
MUDEC has, by vocation, always been attentive to different artistic languages, and it wanted to make its own mark on the exhibition, interpreting Lichtenstein’s body of work and including it within a broader context of American pop culture, expanding the concept of ethnography that characterizes the museum’s mission to cover the anthropology of our contemporary world and everyday life. The exhibition also makes reference conceptually to the material culture of mass consumerism which Lichtenstein absorbed during fifty years of work. Through Multiple Visions, the artist lives the American dream and interprets the tastes, lifestyles and values of the American middle class, creating cultural icons that are immediately recognizable in that they are mass symbol-objects (for example the image of the hot dog or Coca-Cola), and generating conceptual pathways that, from the economic boom of the 1950s/60s to the consumer and mass media culture of the 1980s and 90s, have contributed to building the US social and cultural identity that is instantly recognizable throughout the world.

mpefm ITALY art press release