(Uerdingen 1912–1990 Krefeld)
Kinetic Mirror Relief, signed and dated Luther 1974 on the reverse, 13 over 12 round concave mirrors, over 16 square mirrors with rounded corners on black wooden panel with drive belt, two motors, 104.5 x 104 x 17.5 cm, in Plexiglas box, (PS)

Provenance:
Private Collection, Germany

Exhibited:
Mönchehaus Museum Goslar, Adolf Luther - Licht und Materie, Werke von 1958-1990, 29 April to 4 October 1992;
Mönchehaus Museum Goslar, on-light: Adolf Luther und sein Umkreis, 11 May — 30 June 2013

The work has been registered by the Adolf Luther Foundation, Krefeld, under the archive no. HSP 74/007.

A very rare work with 3 mirrored surfaces placed over one another, with the square mirrors forming the background to the round mirrors.

By adding movement to the concave mirrors in the kinetic mirror relief, Luther came close to achieving his great dream of visualising all the images existing in a space in a very particular way. The additional, automated movement of the variously concave and fixed mirrors finally turns Luther’s dictum that “Space is full of images” into reality. By means of the fourty-one vertically arranged mirrors, instead of reconstructing a pre-existing reality, Adolf Luther developed an ingenious vision of another reality, one beyond the boundaries of common understanding, constantly emerging afresh depending on one’s angle of vision, and with no two realities ever identical.

“The images are located in front of the object in the very space from which they come, and about 50 cms in front of the object at the level of the concave mirror’s radius of curvature. They are not mirror images, not simulacra, instead they are real, concrete and even reverse images, consisting of light and verifiable through a diffusing screen. They are purely immaterial, virtually holographic images, cinematographic and therefore moving images, absorbing every external phenomenon, reflecting them back into the viewer’s eyes. They are colourful although they don’t consist of colour, but rather of energy and nothing else.”
Adolf Luther, Licht und Materie, Recklinghausen 1978, p. 99