Mirror #1 (C.106) opens Roy Lichtenstein's Mirror Series by confronting the most awkward subject a picture can take on — an object whose entire purpose is to show something else. The oval surface is covered in dense Ben-Day dot patterning, bold black curved forms sweeping across it in the way that light catches glass, the marks indicating reflection without sourcing it anywhere or showing what the glass might contain. There is no room behind this mirror, no viewer standing before it, nothing the surface gives back.

Lichtenstein had been working with the printed conventions of mass illustration long enough to know that the marks used to depict a mirror in a comic panel or a magazine advertisement were as codified as any other drawn shorthand — the curved highlight, the contrasting tonal zones, the specific shapes that decades of published imagery had established as meaning reflective. Mirror #1 (C.106) takes those marks and removes everything around them, leaving the conventions to stand alone on the sheet where they can be seen as what they are: a set of agreed-upon signs that trigger recognition without showing anything real.

Produced using linecut, screenprint, embossing, and collage in combination, it is among the most technically elaborate prints in the series, the physical construction of the work — the embossed marks sitting proud of the surface — reinforcing the investigation into surface and depth that the image itself was conducting.

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