Alex Da Corte: Hot Dog With Ketchup at the Whitney Museum

Across Gansevoort Street from the Whitney, and facing the High Line, a building facade now carries an oversized hot dog. Alex Da Corte's Hot Dog with Ketchup (2026) is an inkjet-on-vinyl billboard measuring 17 by 29 feet (5.2 by 8.8 meters). It stays up through May 10, 2027, and can be seen from the street without entering the museum.

The starting point is Roy Lichtenstein's painting Hot Dog (1963). Da Corte took a printout of it and painted ketchup across the surface in a broad, bodily sweep. The gesture is irreverent, yet it also recalls the drama of Jackson Pollock's action painting, setting Pop's cool commercial imagery against the heroic mark of Abstract Expressionism. Lichtenstein himself returned to the subject in Hot Dog with Mustard and related works from 1963-64.

Transforming familiar icons through theatrical intervention is central to Da Corte's practice. Here, art history is pulled into the realm of appetite, desire, and play, and a reproduction is made messy and unsettled by touch. The piece also nods to the hot dog vendors working across the street, carrying the exchange between painters back into the daily life of the block.

Da Corte was born in 1980 in Camden, New Jersey, is Venezuelan American, and lives and works in Philadelphia. He has had major survey exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (Fresh Hell), and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Mr. Remember). His work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Met's Roof Garden Commission. He was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and has written catalogue essays on Marisol and Ellsworth Kelly.

The billboard accompanies Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, which opened at the Whitney on October 11, 2026. Da Corte co-curated that show with Meg Onli, and it is the first major New York museum exhibition of Lichtenstein in more than thirty years. On October 29 at 6:30 pm, the Whitney hosts the Walter Annenberg Lecture with Da Corte.