Roy Lichtenstein is returning to the Whitney in force. Roy Lichtenstein: Like New opens Oct. 11 with roughly 130 works spanning painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture and film, in the first major New York museum survey of the artist in more than three decades.

The familiar Lichtenstein is easy to recognize: Benday dots, comic-book panels, hard outlines and pictures that appear to have rolled off a commercial press. The Whitney’s exhibition is interested in what sits behind that familiarity. Lichtenstein’s surfaces looked mechanical, but they were painstakingly handmade, part of a career-long investigation into how pictures are copied, enlarged, circulated and transformed.

The show begins with work from the early 1940s and continues through the 1990s. Among the best-known pieces are Look Mickey, Girl with Ball, Masterpiece, Drowning Girl, Happy Tears and Artist’s Studio “The Dance.” The breadth matters because the popular shorthand for Lichtenstein can make his career look narrower than it was.

One centerpiece will be a recreation of three murals, including a version of the nearly 96-foot-long Greene Street Mural from 1983. Scale changes the joke in Lichtenstein’s work. A borrowed commercial image that seems banal on a printed page becomes strange when it fills a wall.

The exhibition also reunites all the works from Lichtenstein’s first show of Pop-style work at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. That gathering offers a chance to see the moment when techniques associated with advertising and comics entered the gallery not as source material to disguise, but as visual languages to expose and manipulate.

The Whitney is explicitly connecting that practice to the present. Images now circulate through screenshots, reposts, crops, filters and memes at a speed Lichtenstein could not have experienced, but the basic problem fascinated him decades earlier: what happens to a picture when it is detached from one context and rebuilt in another?

That question also opens the more difficult conversation around appropriation. Lichtenstein’s use of comic imagery has long prompted arguments about authorship and credit. Like New places his work alongside artists including Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone and Sturtevant, widening the discussion from Pop style to copying, influence and the afterlife of images.

The exhibition is organized by Whitney curator Meg Onli and artist Alex Da Corte, serving as guest curator, with Nakai Falcón and David Crane. That pairing suggests the show will treat Lichtenstein as a live problem rather than a sealed chapter of art history.

Member previews run Oct. 8 through 10. The exhibition opens to the public Oct. 11 and remains on view through May 10, 2027.

The Whitney has exhibition and ticket information.