Mirror #5 (C.110) departs from every preceding work in the series by abandoning the circular format entirely — the disc replaced by a tall rectangle that transforms the object being depicted from a hand mirror or decorative glass into something more architectural, more insistent. Two monumental colour blocks fill the picture plane: a solid black on the left, a saturated yellow on the right, the two halves separated by a narrow column of dot-patterned white and bordered at the edges by thin strips of yellow, red, and deep blue. The shift in scale and format changes everything about how the work feels — the contained, self-sufficient quality of the circular works replaced here by something more confrontational, the surface pressing toward the edges of the sheet with nowhere to soften.

The conceptual argument shifts with the format. A circular mirror carries domestic associations — the hand glass, the decorative object, the intimate site of self-examination. A tall rectangular mirror is the mirror on the wall, the mirror in the studio, the mirror through which interior space is doubled and complicated. Roy Lichtenstein was interested in both kinds of object and what distinguished them and Mirror #5 (C.110) tests the rectangular format's specific properties: its verticality, its implication of a full-length reflection, the way its proportions brought it closer to the territory of abstract painting than any circular mirror could.

The colour relationship between the black and yellow fields is the starkest in the series — a pairing so bold it reads almost as a signal rather than a depiction, the two zones asserting themselves independently of their function as a mirror, held in place only by the dot pattern and thin lines that insisted this was still, unambiguously, an image of one.

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