Roy Lichtenstein, Reflections

Why would an artist deliberately obscure their own work?

For Roy Lichtenstein, that question became the starting point for Reflections, one of the most intellectually ambitious print series of his career.

Inspired by an accidental photograph in which reflections on glass completely concealed a Robert Rauschenberg print, Lichtenstein began exploring what happens when an image can never be fully seen. Across the Reflections series, familiar motifs from throughout his career, including comic book heroines, war scenes and his celebrated Brushstrokes, are interrupted by sharp planes of reflected light. The result is a body of work that sits somewhere between Pop Art, abstraction and optical illusion.

In this video, MyArtBroker print specialist Louisa Earl unpacks the ideas behind the series, explaining how Lichtenstein transformed a photographic accident into a meditation on perception, reproduction and the act of looking itself. She explores the relationship between Reflections and earlier series such as Mirrors and Water Lilies, as well as the artist’s continued fascination with appropriation, originality and art history.

The video also looks closely at the extraordinary printmaking techniques behind the works. Combining lithography, screenprint, relief printing, collage and embossing, Lichtenstein layered industrial processes with his signature Ben-Day dots to create images that constantly shift between flatness and depth. Rather than simply depicting reflections, the series encourages viewers to reconstruct the images concealed beneath them.

More than thirty years after it was created, Reflections remains one of Lichtenstein’s most sophisticated explorations of how images are made, remembered and understood, proving that sometimes the most revealing picture is the one we can’t quite see.