THE LIVING ROOM 1990

Roy Lichtenstein's 'The Living Room' captures the feeling of familiar spaces through bold colours and industrial printing techniques. The dots that make up the walls and surfaces, that reference industrial printing processes, flatten the image while also adding texture. This tension gives the image a feeling of being both abstract and real. The colours—red, blue, yellow, and green—are so bright they vibrate and compete for our attention. See the artwork in the frame, it becomes a painting within a painting. It almost looks like a Matisse, something free and expressive against the calculated precision that defines the rest of the scene. That framed 'Matisse' reminds me of Picasso’s many takes on Velazquez. It reveals how artists are in constant dialogue across time, borrowing, responding, and challenging one another. Ultimately, Lichtenstein's living room is less about a real place and more about how we see and represent the world around us, inviting us to question what is real and what is artifice.