Modern Art II 1996

Roy Lichtenstein made this print, Modern Art II, using screenprinting – a process that allowed him to achieve these flat areas of vibrant color and those iconic Ben-Day dots. I'm fascinated by how Lichtenstein takes something as emotionally charged as an eye, and then renders it with such mechanical precision. Look at the way he breaks down the image into distinct zones, almost like a puzzle. The interplay between the solid blacks and the fields of dots creates a visual tension that really pops. That one yellow rectangle jutting out from the nose has a kind of absurd quality. It's like a misplaced detail, yet it's essential to the whole composition. And in the same way that a painter like Francis Picabia might play with representation and abstraction, Lichtenstein is engaging in a similar back-and-forth, questioning what it means to depict something, and how we understand images in our world.