Girl (C.8), made in 1964 as one of 62 colour lithographs in Walasse Ting's celebrated poetry anthology 1¢ Life, occupies a specific and significant position in Roy Lichtenstein's print career: alongside the adjacent Spray Can, it was his first print to feature the Ben-Day dots that would become the defining element of his print style.

The work illustrated Ting's poem Around the U.S.A., appearing on page 118 of the unbound anthology alongside contributions from Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Joan Mitchell.

The work presented a close-up female face in the frontal manner of Lichtenstein's comic-book figure work: blue eyes, red lips, yellow hair built through the bold print style that would define his output for the following decade. The fetishised features — the precision of the makeup, the perfection of the colouring — were a commentary on the idealised representations of women in American mass media and advertising, a subject that would recur throughout his career. The Ben-Day dot in Girl was a stroke with a double identity: derived from commercial printing, it was also applied by hand, each dot placed individually.

This gap between the mechanical appearance and the handmade reality was fundamental to Lichtenstein's method — the paradox of a stroke that looked like a machine had made it and was in fact as laboured as any painterly gesture.

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