(Uerdingen 1912–1990 Krefeld)
Concave mirror object, signed and dated on the reverse Luther 71, 8 x 3 concave mirrors arranged in strips on black coated wooden panel, 101 x 101 x 9.5 cm, in Plexiglas box, (PS)

The present work is registered at the Adolf-Luther-Stiftung, Krefeld, under work no. Hsp/71/002.

We are grateful to Dr. Magdalena Broska, Adolf-Luther-Stiftung, Krefeld, for her kind assistance.

Provenance:
Private Collection, Germany

“And as the viewer moves, and is expected to move, before these walls, he undergoes, and is expected to undergo, a complex experience. The complexity of this experience results from the fact that the perception of the changing phenomena taking place in time is combined with the simultaneous awareness that the system remains the same and is made of always identical mirrors. As serial systems that are easily comprehensible in their definite structure and rooted in the viewer’s conscience, Luther’s Concave Mirror Objects develop a dialectic relation to the changes they reflect.”(1) The 24 concave, striped mirrors are used by Luther both as instruments of optical multiplication and as instruments of an immaterial light phenomenon produced by them and them alone. Within the field of light and constructive art of the 1960s and 1970s, Adolf Luther was an absolute outsider. With works such as the present one, he came to terms with the physical visibility of light as a reality and his only subject, elevating it to a touchstone for inner and outer art. (2)
(1)Max Imdahl in: Adolf Luther, Licht und Materie, Recklinghausen 1978, p. 24
(2)cp.: Magdalena Broska, Adolf Luther, Eine außergewöhnliche Künstlerkarriere, Goch 2012, p. 20 ff