Adolf Luther (1912-1990) - Hohlspiegelobjekt (Concave mirror object)

Adolf Luther (1912 – 1990): 4 R 600

signed and dated Luther 68 and numbered 13 (on the reverse)

four square concave mirrors mounted on a square mirror plate on wood panel, in plexiglas cover box

25 by 25 by 7.5 cm.
9⅞ by 9⅞ by 3 in.

Executed in 1968.

Provenance
Galerie Denise René & Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf
german auction house
Kunstkontor Basel

An early and characteristic example of Luther's concave mirror works, the group that defines his mature contribution to light art.
The intimate format concentrates the optical effect into a single, immediate field of vision.
Signed, dated and titled by the artist on the reverse.

Conceived in 1968, the year Luther consolidated his work with concave and convex mirrors into an independent body of work, 4 R 600 takes its title from its own optical specification: four mirrors, each ground to a radius of 600 millimetres. The designation is deliberately unliterary. Luther understood these objects less as sculptures than as instruments — devices calibrated to make light itself the subject.

Four square concave mirrors are mounted onto a flat mirror plate and sealed beneath a clear plexiglas cover. The incident image is caught, inverted and projected forward into the room, where it appears as an immaterial presence in front of the object rather than within it. The viewer is not positioned before a picture but inside its optical field, and any movement reorganises the entire configuration. What the work delivers is not an image but the conditions under which an image occurs.

Luther, a trained jurist who came to art as an autodidact and exhibited with ZERO from 1962, arrived at this position through glass: light, for him, was the only genuinely immaterial medium available to painting's successors. The concave mirror objects extend that logic to its conclusion — the object recedes, the phenomenon remains. In the small formats of 1968 this argument is made with unusual economy, and it is precisely their compression that makes them among the most legible statements of his programme.

Condition: patinated with fine scratches, light oxidation on the mirror edges (typical for Luther works) and signs of use, overall good.
The photos are part of the condition description.