Two Paintings (C.205) is the most abstract work in Roy Lichtenstein's Paintings Series — a picture in which two depicted paintings, neither clearly representational, occupied the wall of the depicted interior, their forms and marks examined as compositional elements within the larger print instead of as recognisable images. The collage element added to the woodcut, lithograph, and screenprint gave the work a material layering that reinforced its examination of the painting as a physical object.

The abstraction of the depicted works was significant. Throughout the Paintings Series Lichtenstein had moved between figurative and non-figurative depicted paintings, the contrast between the two modes — and the question of whether that contrast mattered — embedded in the series' structure. Two Paintings (C.205) was the work in which this question was posed most directly: two paintings whose content was not readily identifiable, their status as art objects dependent on context — the frame, the wall, the compositional arrangement indicating a gallery or domestic interior — with no readable subject matter to fall back on.

This was the same argument Lichtenstein had been making throughout his career: that the status of an object as art was a function of context as much as content, that the gallery wall and the print catalogue did as much work as the image itself. Two Paintings (C.205) made this within the Paintings Series by giving the depicted works no legible content, making context the only available source of meaning — the series' most purely conceptual work, and one of the most demanding in his catalogue.

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