Female Head 1977

Roy Lichtenstein made this Pop art print, Female Head, using screen printing, and it really messes with your head. I mean, is it one woman or two? The Ben-Day dots, a signature of Lichtenstein's style, give it that comic book vibe, but here, they're almost like a veil, layering and obscuring the image. The flat, bold colors – the primary reds, yellows, and blues – are so assertive; they bounce off each other, creating this visual vibration. It’s like the whole thing is about surface, about image, about the way we consume and process visuals, not about, say, portraiture. There’s this tension between the graphic, almost mechanical reproduction, and the hint of something deeper. It's a real challenge to what art is supposed to be. Sort of how someone like Ellsworth Kelly took the readymade and abstraction and made them new again, Lichtenstein is in that conversation of taking the familiar and making us see it differently.