Characteristically bold and stylised, Roy Lichtenstein’s Woman with Mirror brings together two enduring motifs that fascinated the Pop-art pioneer from the earliest days of his career: the female form and the mirror. In consolidating these two threads with his signature graphic precision, Lichtenstein presents a profound meditation on mass media’s portrayal of feminine beauty through his pioneering flat-profile sculptures of the 1990s. Woman with Mirror shatters sculptural norms and heralds the return of the female form in the artist’s late oeuvre, marking the apex of Lichtenstein’s sculptural output. Affirming the work’s importance, the present edition was exhibited in Roy Lichtenstein: Recognisable Images that travelled across North America and Europe from 1998 to 2000. Belonging to an edition of six, another cast is held in the esteemed Broad collects ion, Los Angeles, while the present example was retained by Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, for their personal collects ion, where it has resided since its creation.

Cast in 1996, just one year prior to the artist’s death, Woman with Mirror encapsulates Lichtenstein’s lauded ability to (re)interpret his own celebrated oeuvre. Looking to the comic-strip and advertising references that directly inspired his iconic War and Romance paintings from the 1960s, by the 1990s, Lichtenstein was turning their reductive and binary depictions of women on its head for a new generation. Lichtenstein’s refreshing simplicity of representation is here harnessed to depict the bust of a woman as she holds up a mirror to observe herself. Lichtenstein’s mirror in the present work does not reflect the work’s subject but instead faces forward toward us – the observer. Representing his subject with a fluidity much akin to his Brushstrokes series, Lichtenstein’s Woman with Mirror serves as commentary on the self-objectification and voyeurism prevalent in mass media of the late 20^th century. While the advertisements of Lichtenstein’s era reinforced parochial attitudes toward the role of women in contemporary society, the artist challenged viewers to question their role as observer in these dynamics.

A pioneer of the Pop Art movement, Lichtenstein first gained popularity and acclaim for his Girls series in the early 1960s that appropriated the cliched archetypes of female beauty propagated in comic books and magazines. Lichtenstein’s self-referential impulse is keenly felt in the present work, from his iconic painting Girl in Mirror from 1964 to his Mirrors of 1966-71, he draws a continuous thread through his own output. In contrast to the pictorial strategies employed in these earlier works, Woman with Mirror notably incorporates a literal mirror as opposed to a pictorial conceit as in his earlier works, blurring the line between representation and reality. In doing so, it implicates the viewer directly, drawing attention to the act of looking and the constructed nature of identity. The present sculpture’s ability to question the duality of women’s inner self and outer appearance draws unmistakable parallels to Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror from 1932. Lichtenstein’s life-long fascination with Picasso fuelled a continuous dialogue with Cubism, exemplifying his ability to contend with art historical precedent and contemporary pop culture vernacular.

In Woman with Mirror, Lichtenstein’s visual lexicon is deftly transposed from the canvas to three-dimensional space. From certain angles, the figure appears almost like a cut-out, a drawing sprung into space; from others, the figure’s profile sharpens into uncanny dimensionality. Lichtenstein transforms a traditionally volumetric medium into a site of pictorial experimentation: sharp outlines of animated figures that at once disintegrate and reanimate space. Woman with Mirror furthers the boundaries of the medium, challenging the very substance and definition of sculpture as a necessarily three-dimensional form of expression. As art historian Hal Foster describes, “these pieces exist between painting and sculpture in terms not only of genre but also of structure; where Minimalist objects are neither painting nor sculpture… Pop objects tend to be both – and if most representational painting is a two-dimensional encoding of three-dimensional objects, Lichtenstein reverses the process here, and freezes it somewhere in between" (Hal Foster, “Pop Pygmalion,” in: Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein: Sculpture, 2005, p. 10). With its rhythmic contours and conceptual claritys , the present work distils a lifet.mes of formal inquiry into a singular, commanding object that stands as a thrilling exploration of gendered representation. Woman with Mirror exemplifies the enduring relevance of Lichtenstein’s practice to affirm his place as one of the most visionary artists of the 20th century.