Reflections on Conversation (C.240) set Roy Lichtenstein's comic-book figure work — the intimate drama of his early 1960s romance and narrative panels — under the diagonal silver bands of the Reflection Series, the pictured conversation between figures breaking across the metalized strips. The source imagery, drawn from the idiom of popular comics, was already a representation of representation; the reflective overlay made that double remove its explicit subject.

The Reflection Series was Lichtenstein's most direct reckoning with his own artistic history. By taking his earlier imagery — the Brushstrokes, the comic-book figures, the Crash paintings — and representing it through the established mode of reflection, he made works that were simultaneously new images and critical readings of images already in the world. Reflections on Conversation (C.240) was the most intimate of the group in its subject — the conversation, the close exchange between figures, refracted into pieces by the reflective surface — giving the work a quality of interrupted communication that sat in poignant relation to its means.

The combination of woodcut and screenprint with the metalized PVC collage yielded a surface of considerable material complexity — the woodcut's physical texture, the screenprint's solid colour, and the collage's actual reflectivity all present simultaneously. Roy Lichtenstein had developed this kind of technical layering across the Entablature and Mirror series, and the Reflection prints represented its fullest expression. Reflections on Conversation (C.240) was the point at which the case made about representation and reflection, conducted across the whole series, intersected most directly with its human subject matter.

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