The Reflection Series, made by Roy Lichtenstein in 1990, was among the most self-referential bodies of work of his career — a group of prints in which his own earlier imagery was seen through the diagonal silver bands that indicated, in his established shorthand, a reflective surface. Reflections on Brushstrokes (C.242) took his celebrated Brushstroke paintings of the mid-1960s as its subject, the gestural stroke — Pop Art's most pointed commentary on Abstract Expressionism — now refracted through the established terms of reflection.

The layering was typical of Lichtenstein's mature working method. The Brushstroke works had themselves been a reading of gesture — the painterly stroke set down as a coded sign, the energy of Abstract Expressionism translated into the cool language of commercial illustration. Reflections on Brushstrokes (C.242) added a further remove: the Brushstroke image seen in a mirror, its already-mediated stroke now doubly processed, the idiom of gesture read through the method of reflection. The diagonal silver PVC bands crossed the composition, slicing the Brushstroke image into sections visible between the metallic strips.

The technical construction of the Reflection Series was among the most complex in Lichtenstein's print catalogue — lithograph, screenprint, woodcut, and metalized PVC collage combined with embossing on Somerset paper, each work a layered object as well as a printed image. By 1990 Lichtenstein was using the physical materials of the print to advance positions that the image alone could not. The reflective PVC collage incorporated an actual reflective surface into a work about pictured reflection — the literal and the represented occupying the same physical space.

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