Virtual Interior; Portrait Of A Duck 1995

Roy Lichtenstein made ‘Virtual Interior; Portrait Of A Duck’ without a known date, using his signature screen printing technique. There’s a kind of flatness here, a deliberate embrace of the mechanically reproduced. The hard lines and Ben-Day dots almost dare you to find the artist’s hand, to see the process. But look closer. Notice the way the blue lines of Donald Duck and the stool wobble slightly, as if Lichtenstein couldn’t quite suppress the urge to let his hand, his personality, show through. The palette is so deliberately limited; a kind of pop-art-primary with the volume turned way up. It reminds me a bit of some of David Hockney's set designs, that same playful distortion of space and perspective, the same wink at the audience. This piece is such a great reminder that art isn’t about answers, it’s about the conversation. It’s about how we can keep seeing and keep thinking, even when we think we know exactly what we're looking at.