Adolf Luther

About the artist

Adolf Luther (1912-1990) is a leading representative of post-war conceptual light art. Together with the artists of the Zero movement, Luther belonged to the artistic avant-garde of these decades, who countered traditional artistic techniques, materials and subjects with new ones. Luther's work focuses on visualising and experiencing "light as energy" (Luther) by means of artistic settings. In the visualisation of "light as energy", the artist was concerned with realising his intention as objectively as possible, which seemed to him to be guaranteed by working with industrially produced, anonymous forms and materials. After various approaches, he began experimenting with glass in 1961. He created objects made of shattered glass, so-called "light locks", which were shown in a Zero exhibition at the Diogenes Gallery in Berlin in 1963. By using ground lenses, he finally arrived at concave curved concave mirrors in 1964. Reflections of light as well as upside-down, free-floating, constantly changing images of matter in the surrounding space, which only become visible through the light, refer to light as an energetic source. Luther based his research on the work "Light and Matter" by the French physicist and Nobel Prize winner Louis de Broglies. His works are therefore often labelled "Light and Matter" on the back. In the 1970s, the artist began to integrate his concave mirror objects into architectural structures (e.g. "Spherical concave mirror object Olympia", entrance zone of the Munich sports hall, Olympic Stadium, 1972), whereby the artist was interested not only in the interplay of his artistic concepts with the architecture, but also with the surrounding interior and exterior space. A striking example of the latter concept is Luther's "Integration Stehlinsen" (hollow mirror lenses/stainless steel) at Ostwall in Krefeld, which was realised posthumously in 1991.
Luther's exploration of light brought him into contact with the Zero movement, in whose exhibitions he has been represented since 1963 and to this day (e.g. 2014 New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow; 2015 Berlin, Martin Gropius Bau: ZERO - The International Art Movement of the 50s and 60s). From 1969 onwards, the artist had numerous solo museum exhibitions. In addition to participating in the Zero exhibitions, he is also represented in international exhibitions on kinetic art, Op Art and architecture and space. Luther's works can be found in numerous museums and public collections.