Roy Lichtenstein
40.9 × 53.0 in
Mirror #8 (C.113) presents two tall rectangular mirrors side by side — both rendered in blue Ben-Day dot patterning on a white ground, the two forms so similar in their marks that the difference between them registers only gradually, in slight variations of dot density and the small black and coloured accents at the edges. A narrow yellow strip runs between the two forms, the only clearly distinct colour element in an image that otherwise holds close to white and blue throughout.
The doubling here operates differently from Mirror #7. Where the paired ovals were tonal opposites — one dark, one light — these two rectangles are near-identical, the repetition raising a question about whether two things that look the same are the same thing or two separate instances of the same convention. Lichtenstein had examined serial variation across his career — in the Haystack and Cathedral prints, in the state variants that ran through multiple series — and Mirror #8 (C.113) brought that interest directly into this body of work, placing two nearly indistinguishable surfaces alongside each other and asking what the viewer was actually looking at: two mirrors, one mirror seen twice, or two versions of the same set of marks with nothing behind either of them.
The reductive palette — blue dots against near-white — gave the work a quietness that the bolder colour statements elsewhere in the series had not attempted, the argument made through proximity and repetition rather than through chromatic contrast or formal drama.
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