11 October 2026 — 10 May 2027

Alex Da Corte: Hot Dog with Ketchup

Alex Da Corte's Hot Dog with Ketchup (2026), installed on the building facade on Gansevoort Street across from the Whitney and the High Line, turns a familiar picture into an unruly encounter. Starting from a printout of Roy Lichtenstein's painting Hot Dog (1963), Da Corte smears ketchup across its surface in a loose, bodily sweep. The gesture is irreverent, but it also conjures the drama of Jackson Pollock's action painting, bringing Pop's cool commercial image into contact with the heroic mark of Abstract Expressionism. In Da Corte's hands, art history is not kept at a respectful distance but pulled into the realm of appetite, desire, and play. Such collisions are central to his practice, in which familiar icons are made strange through acts of theatrical transformation. Hot Dog with Ketchup is a reproduction made messy—and unsettled—by touch. Lichtenstein himself returned to the subject in Hot Dog with Mustard and related works of 1963–64, making it a small but vivid part of his Pop vocabulary. Conceived partly in response to the hot dog vendors across the street, Da Corte's version is a site-specific nod to the vendors themselves, carrying this art-historical exchange back into the public life of the street. The billboard is presented in conjunction with Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, on view at the Whitney from October 11, 2026, which Da Corte co-curated with Meg Onli, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator. It is part of the museum's Outside of the Box program of public art. Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, New Jersey) is a Venezuelan American artist who lives and works in Philadelphia. His expansive practice has been the subject of major survey exhibitions including The Whale at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fresh Hell at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and Mr. Remember at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and his work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Roof Garden Commission. He has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Glenstone, the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Secession, the Hammer Museum's Art + Practice, MASS MoCA, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. He has also written long-form catalogue essays for major touring exhibitions on Marisol and Ellsworth Kelly, and was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Whitney Museum of American Art