Girls

Girls documents an exhibition built around one of Pop Art's founding subjects: the anonymous, mass-produced face of the romance comic heroine.

The catalogue reproduces fifteen paintings and two ceramic sculptures shown at Gagosian's 980 Madison Avenue space in New York in 2008, alongside related studies and the newspaper and comic-book source images Roy Lichtenstein worked from when he began this body of work in the summer of 1961. The book runs 94 pages and includes a conversation between Dorothy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons, a tribute by Richard Hamilton, and an artist's book contribution by Richard Prince, with graphic design by Graphic Thought Facility; it was co-published by Gagosian and Yale University Press.

Lichtenstein (1923-1997) built his reputation on paintings that translated the Ben-Day dots and cropped compositions of commercial printing into fine art, and the women of his romance-comic paintings, alongside Warhol's celebrities, became one of Pop Art's central images of mass-media femininity. Girls revisits that early-1960s body of work through the Gagosian exhibition and the ongoing scholarship of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.