Energetic Statuette Adolf Luther

When Luther gave up his career as a judge in the 1950s to dedicate himself full-time to art, he found the creation of scientific and technical images to be the most suitable medium for expressing the problems that concerned him. The programme of his kinetic art emerged from his investigations into the physical properties of light. In his works, he sought to integrate architecture with sculpture, with his fundamental aim being to expand space and to rethink the dialogue between humans and their surroundings. Among the different transparent or reflective components he used in his art, all of which emphasised the materiality of light, the most characteristic were his concave mirrors. The spatial objects he created using an assortment of lenses, sometimes paired with laser beams or with bundles of light rays focused on smoke, generated an illusion of apparent motion, which was intended to jolt viewers out of their entrenched ways of looking at art. By intensifying perception, Luther’s works provide us with an evocative experience of space, in which dimensions lose their significance, and ideas of up and down become interchangeable.