Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923, d. 1997)

Born in New York City, Lichtenstein began, in 1961, to make paintings consisting exclusively of comic-strip figures, and introduced his Benday-dot grounds, lettering, and balloons; he also started cropping images from advertisements. From 1964, each series of works played with the characteristics of well-known 20th-century art movements. He also explored the mediums such as polychromatic ceramic, aluminum, brass, and serigraphs. From 1962, he had regular exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, and was honored with solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1968 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, respectively, and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1994, and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou.