Reflections On Brushstrokes
Reflections On Brushstrokes
Signed Mixed Media
Roy Lichtenstein
Mixed Media, 1990
Signed Mixed Media Edition of 68
H 145cm x W 180cm
Critical Review
Reflections On Brushstrokes from 1990 belongs to Roy Lichtenstein’s Reflections series. The sequence takes the artist’s popular designs and disrupts them by seemingly depicting them through a glass lens. As opposed to a simple concept of ‘theme and variation’, the Reflections series also plays with Lichtenstein’s favoured ideas of light and reflection. The partly hidden images in this sequence are altered and obscured by the fractions of stylised glass, pushing them to the point of abstraction. The subjects are glimpsed between sharp mirrored shapes that break and refract the surface of the image.
Reflections On Brushstrokes acts as a parody of the value placed on the traditional artistic gesture of brushwork throughout art history. Lichtenstein challenged long-standing conventions of artistic practice by incorporating the brushstroke motif in several of his printed series. As opposed to a freestyle stroke at the hands of modern artists, the sweeps in this work are reproduced systematically and precisely through industrial printing processes. The curving contours are juxtaposed against the rigid straight lines of the glass, forming a jarring contrast between the different layers in the composition. The work draws attention to the visual effects of reflection and the refraction of light as well as the multitude of different patterns, colours, and forms.
