(Uerdingen 1912–1990 Krefeld)
“Sphärisches Objekt” - concave mirror object, 1969, titled, signed, dated Luther 69 on the reverse, 3 x 3 round concave half transparent mirrors on one plane mirror, laid down on panel, 117 x 117 x 7.7 cm, plexiglass box

The work has been registered by the Adolf Luther Foundation Krefeld under the archive no. HSP 69 011 and will be integrated in the digital catalogue raisonné.

Very early work from that series.

Provenance:
Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

Exhibited:
Moderne Galerie Bottrop, 13.5–17.6.1979

“The determination and insistence on approaching the medium of light in its entire spectrum gains its undisputed culmination with the Vor-Bild (fore image) that the concave mirror is capable of producing.”
Dieter Honisch (ed.), Licht und Materie, Recklinghausen 1978,n. p.

According to one’s position, the viewer sees the ‘fore image’ as a reverse appearance, both irritating and fascinating at the same time. The instrument of the concave mirror reflects and interacts with every moving appearance that it takes up from the exterior, and which it projects back as a bundled reverse image into the room. The object can only perform its function when viewed by the observer. Adolf Luther’s spherical object is arranged in its size and its nine large serial mirrors so that the viewer moves in front of the object, and should move, for only in this manner is the complex experience which the artist intended conveyed: that of conceiving light and the surrounding space in repeatedly new ways.

The works of Luther render light as an immaterial, complex reality that does not exhaust itself. The light is therefore object and predicate of the work. The concave mirror-objects serve as instruments, whereby their instrumental function consists in their optically multiplying the existing reality with the help of many identical concave mirrors. The concave mirror is a serial reflection medium of the light, only open in one direction, which “centrifuges the flection of the images from its interior, whose focal point lies outside itself, briefly stated, which projects the pictures back where they come from: into the three-dimensional real space.”
Ralph Merten, Adolf Luther - Am Anfang war das Licht, Stuttgart 1987, p. 194