Reflections on Crash (C.239) returned to one of the most charged images in Roy Lichtenstein's early print catalogue — the Crash subject, the collision and its explosive burst of colour and sound effects — and submitted it to the reflective fragmentation of the Reflection Series. The bold yellows, reds, and onomatopoeic text of the Crash imagery, already a highly charged chromatic construction, were cut across by the diagonal silver bands, the image present but interrupted, visible between the metallic strips.

The Crash subject had been among the most direct expressions of Lichtenstein's comic-book preoccupation in the 1960s — images of violence and collision made with the cool impersonality of his comic-book idiom, the emotional charge of the subject in studied contrast with the coolness of the treatment. Reflections on Crash (C.239) reactivated this friction from a distance of more than two decades, setting the Crash imagery in a context that had gathered substantial art-historical weight. By 1990 the Crash prints were canonical works; the Reflection Series treated them as such, reading them as historical objects, not as provocations.

The metalized PVC collage incorporated an actual reflective surface into a work that pictured reflection — the silver strips both representing mirror glass and being, in some sense, mirror glass. Roy Lichtenstein consistently used material literalism of this kind to complicate the boundary between represented and physical reality. Reflections on Crash (C.239) made this complication most acute, the reflective collage catching the light of the room in which it was displayed and drawing the viewer's own environment into a work that was otherwise entirely self-contained.

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