Mirror Mirror: Then and Now

In the 1960s, mirrors began to be used by artists across a spectrum of international movements including pop, kinetic, minimal, and conceptual art. Mirror surfaces reflected the environment and the viewer, 'like a visual pun on representation', as Ian Burn observed. Not just a looking glass, mirrors indexed the instability of perception, while inviting a viewer to participate in the purported endgame of late modernism. Mirror Mirror presents classic mirror pieces from the 1960s and early 1970s by major artists including Robert Smithson, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Art & Language, Ian Burn, Joan Jonas, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, Meret Oppenheim, Richard Hamilton, and Shusaku Arakawa. Alongside them are works by contemporary Australian artists—Robyn Backen, Christian Capurro, Peter Cripps, Mikala Dwyer, Alex Gawronski, Callum Morton, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Jacky Redgate and Robert Pulie—that make all kinds of interconnections and reverberations with the art of the 1960s. Mirror Mirror: Then and Now has been curated by Ann Stephen, and is a joint project with the University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, in association with Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide. The publication has been supported by a grant from the Gordon Darling Foundation.