Mirror #1 1969

Roy Lichtenstein made this 'Mirror #1' with paint, but the real material here is something less tangible. Lichtenstein's approach is a meditation on how we see, and how we think about images. Look at the surface - the way those dots shift and warp across the canvas, creating a sensation of depth, of movement. There's this very particular language of comic books and mass media that Lichtenstein is using, but he's pushing it towards abstraction. The Ben-Day dots, normally used to create tone and shading, become almost like pixels – a way of breaking down the image into its most basic components. It makes me think about Bridget Riley, and her investigations into perception and the optical effects of pattern. But where Riley’s work is often about pure sensation, Lichtenstein’s always has this wink, this awareness of the image as a cultural product. It’s like he’s saying, "We think we’re seeing a mirror, but what we’re really seeing is just another image".