Artist Rooms: Roy Lichtenstein

Reflections: A Series Of Changing Displays Of Contemporary Art

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) (until January 10 2016)

With the photography of Lee Miller and David Bailey forming this year's "blockbuster" summer shows in Edinburgh, and with those artists occupying the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Scottish National Gallery respectively, the ground floor of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art's Modern One is given over for the rest of the year to selected works by 1960s Pop Art star Roy Lichtenstein. It's the latest instalment in the ongoing Artist Rooms series and, making a virtue of its slightness, the gallery is eking it out with a complementary show drawn from the permanent collection.

Slight it may be, but don't think this isn't a draw: the subject is a man whose work looks more prescient the further we travel into a digital century which increasingly values images over words and which has raised the comic book - Lichtenstein's prime source material - to the status of high art.

Scottish gallerygoers are already familiar with the American's iconic 1963 work In The Car, a cornerstone of the national collection since 1980 when it was purchased for £100,000. It's on show here, of course, as is Wall Explosion II, a 1965 relief on loan from London's Tate Gallery. But with the exception of 1988's Reflections: Art, the other 16 works are all screenprints and date from the 1990s, the last decade of Lichtenstein's life.

Ranged over three rooms, they're drawn mostly from four series the artist undertook between 1990 and 1996. They are Reflections, Modern Art, Water Lilies and Compositions.

In the first, from 1990, Lichtenstein re-fashions his own Pop Art works from the 1960s but with strips of the image missing. It's if they're being viewed through glass or (more interesting) are being deliberately defaced. We see his trademark speech bubbles and we see the words inside them, but with chunks of text missing they become unreadable. Sometimes, as with Reflections: Crash, the original painting the work seems to be referencing doesn't actually exist, so in that sense Lichtenstein is also playfully re-imagining his own artistic past.

In Modern Art, from 1996, and Water Lilies, from 1992, it's the back catalogues of others that he turns to by re-working paintings by Picasso and Monet. In an homage of sorts to the Spaniard, he takes a Lichtenstein trademark - a graphic, comic book-inspired pictures of women - and cuts them into bold, Cubist-inspired portraits. Turning to Monet's famous Nympheas set of paintings, he creates bold, semi-abstract images.

The prints themselves are bright and flawless in their construction - In The Car, by contrast, is fairly showing its age - and their use of products such as metalised PVC reveal an artist whose questing after new techniques and materials clearly never stopped. On the Water Lilies series, for example, Lichtenstein prints onto enamel and stainless steel so that on the parts he leaves blank, the viewer can see their own image reflected.

Compositions, from 1992, is a nod to the artist's abiding love of jazz and shows looping, interlocking staff lines on which musical notes appear like dancing figures. Filling the spaces between them are either his familiar Benday dots or solid blocks of colour.

Finally, the show includes five female nudes, created between 1992 and 1994 and, amazingly, the first that Lichtenstein ever produced. Again, he uses comics for his source material so the women are portrayed reading books or leaning casually against sofas. It gives the suite an incongruous air and a kind of innocence. There's wit too: in Nude With Yellow Pillow, for example, we can see one of Lichtenstein's own Water Lilies prints hanging in the background.

Taking their inspiration in part from Lichtenstein's interest in windows and surfaces, and borrowing a title from his painting Reflections: Art, the curators have filled the rest of Modern One's ground floor with works drawn mostly from the standing collection. The works will change as the year goes on.

Lining the central corridor in the show's first incarnation are 50 or so studies of the human head by artists whose work spans a period from 1649 (Claude Mellan's exquisite Head Of Christ) to the present day, and which includes drawings, paintings and screenprints by Picabia, Munch, Klee, Magritte, Freud, Warhol, Lichtenstein himself (Reverie, from 1965) and Picasso (two works: Weeping Woman, from 1937 and the newly-acquired Cubist drawing Head, from 1912). Among the Scots on show are John Bellany, Eduardo Paolozzi, Stephen Conroy, SJ Peploe, Peter Howson and Douglas Gordon, whose 2006 work Self-Portrait, You + Me faces down the corridor and is simply a framed mirror.

Many of these are old familiar friends so the oomph comes from works like Martin Creed's eye-catching, site-specific commission Work No. 2145. It's a series of diamond patterns painted directly onto a wall as a response to the sculpture which dominates the space, Sol LeWitt's 1972 work Modular Structures (Sequential Permutations On The Number Five). LeWitt's beguiling Double Composite screenprint is also on show, alongside other works on paper by Creed. It's hard not to leave that room with a smile on your face.

Covering another wall at the other end of the gallery is a work which marks the first showing in Scotland for American artist Louise Lawler and elsewhere there's an installation by Glasgow-based artist Cathy Wilkes, We Are Pro Choice. But perhaps the most affecting display is the new acquisition by American photographer Taryn Simon, one of 18 "chapters" he created for his project A Living Man Declared Dead And Other Chapters. This one, Chapter VIII, is a collection of portraits of several generations of a single Scottish family affected by Thalidomide, among them triplets Anne, Jacqueline and Kathleen Gallagher. It's the last room you pass through before entering the Lichtenstein, but it's about as far from Pop Art as it's possible to go.