Modern Head #5 (C.95) brings Roy Lichtenstein's Modern Head Series to its most unconventional point — an embossed graphite image with a Strathmore die-cut paper overlay, mounted in a white lacquered aluminium frame with a wood stretcher support.

The work exists at the boundary between print and sculptural object, its physical structure as much a part of its meaning as the printed image it presents. The head appears in stark black and white, the die-cut overlay adding a layered, almost bas-relief quality that no conventional print process could achieve. The decision to arrive here with a work that questioned the boundaries of the print medium was typical of Lichtenstein's intelligence as an artist. Having moved through woodcut, lithograph, linecut, and metal-plate printing across the five Modern Heads, he ended with a work that could not be straightforwardly categorised as any of these — a print that was also an object, framed as an artwork rather than simply contained by a frame.

Lichtenstein consistently used the final works in his series to complicate or extend the terms established by the preceding works, and Modern Head #5 (C.95) did this with particular force.

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