Mirror #7 (C.112) places two oval discs side by side — the only work in the series to set more than one mirror within a single image, the pairing turning the investigation into something it had not previously been: a question about the relationship between two reflective surfaces rather than the properties of one. The left disc is dark, near-black with deep green occupying the lower and outer zones, a small field of dots at the lower left; the right is lighter, its outer ring in dark green, its centre white with blue Ben-Day dot patterning, a yellow arc catching the upper edge. The two forms are calibrated opposites — one absorbed into darkness, the other open and airy — yet both rendered through the same inherited conventions of indicated reflection.

Roy Lichtenstein had spent the preceding works testing what happened when a single mirror surface was subjected to different conditions — spare, dark, divided, arched. Placing two mirrors in the same image asked a different question: not what a mirror was, but what happened when one was set beside another. The associations were multiple — binoculars, opera glasses, the instruments through which looking is directed and concentrated — and in a series concerned with the mechanics of visual representation, the implication that mirrors might be instruments of seeing as much as surfaces of reflection was not incidental.

The contrast between the dark left form and the open right one gave the work a formal tension none of the single-surface pieces had produced, meaning arising from the gap between the two ovals as much as from either one examined alone.

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