It depends on the distance.

In 1969, the critic Georg Jappe assessed it in this newspaper at "a good one meter", then the "image veil in front of the glass wall" sets in, a spatial experience equal to a "Fata Morgana", the reviewer wrote about an exhibition by Adolf Luther in Leverkusen and came to the conclusion: “Reflecting itself, light represents itself. Metaphysics?

Optics?

Metaoptics?” Feuilleton was that philosophical back then.

Not only that. In view of an installation with beams of light falling vertically from the ceiling onto numerous concave mirrors on the floor, the chronicler had a recommendation ready that would no longer be accepted today: "Whoever smokes here gets more out of the light."

In the underground museum in Bochum, the “Focusing Room” from 1968 unfolds its ethereal effect even for visitors without a cigarette.

In fact, many of Luther's mirror objects open up a spherical space when you look at them from the right distance, which surrounds your perception like a hologram.

The appearance is, to use a buzzword today, absolutely immersive, thanks to the curvature of mirrors arranged squarely in a grid to look like floodlights in a football stadium.

Adolf Luther (1912 to 1990), who was born in Krefeld, knew how to orchestrate clarity, transparency and purity in his objects in a wide variety of pitches.

With flat and curved mirrors in flawless glass containers, he created instruments of vision with a cool rationalism,

The Bochum exhibition fans out the facets of this work, from early massive paint spatulas, which still reflect the color matt, to a room with several heavy pictorial objects including a free-standing "sine curve" - ​​these works have often been encountered in recent decades, but they have rarely been seen so harmoniously and weightlessly in a group.

The room bathes in euphony, but also bears witness to this: this work does not go beyond retinal impressionism.

Luther's path in life went from administrative judge to artist

Less well known, the exhibition pays tribute to Adolf Luther's collection.

He was on the lookout for new pictorial concepts from Nouveau Réalisme to Concrete Art in circles of colleagues.

A selection of the eighty works is given its own, albeit not exactly inspiring, room, hung close together.

It would have been more promising to bring Luther's acquisitions into dialogue with his own work, even if that had put his oeuvre into perspective.

François Morellet, Lucio Fontana or Jan J. Schoonhoven have set the phenomena of light, space, order and contingency to work more simply and fundamentally with less effort and apparatus.

Interesting to see that Luther himself acquired a "teaching board from the Office for Direct Democracy" from 1971 from an antipode, Joseph Beuys - one of the few

To mark its thirtieth anniversary, the Krefeld Adolf Luther Foundation published a monograph weighing a kilo in 2021, which presents Luther as a whole and plausibly explains how this sculptor inspired later generations of artists, such as Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson and Angela Bulloch.

The book also describes the unusual career of the autodidact, which finally led to the profession of artist in 1957 via the young Essen city inspector and the administrative judge in Minden and Düsseldorf.

Luther resigned from the civil service.

Thanks to prudent economic services of general interest, he was able to afford it and build up an autonomous artistic existence, which not only kept him afloat, but also made him one of the most sought-after artists in the old Federal Republic, when foyers and conference rooms in institutes, banks,

For the period from 1938 to 1945, the biography lists only a few dates, for 1943 the meager entry "Promotion in Bonn zum Dr.

jur.”

That alone cannot suffice as information.

Further information about those years is "first watercolors and drawings" on the western front, "deepened artistic studies" on the Channel Islands, "life drawing in the studios on Montparnasse".

During the war, Luther painted rather harmless impressions, but immediately afterwards he brought thoughtful things to the canvas, such as a "self-reflection" from 1947. One would have liked to see something of that in the show, too.

Adolf Luther - Light.

work and collection.

Museum underground, Bochum, until April 10th.

An artist monograph from 2021 from Hirmer Verlag costs 68 euros.