Works of art that use mirrors

Lucas Samaras, Mirrored Room (1966)

Works of art that use mirrors:

• Gerold Tagwerker, MIRROR_X#1 (2010)
• Christian Egger, Untitled (A.R.E. U.S. ((( O ))) dich vs. DU !!!) (2009)
• Gerold Tagwerker, Fade (date?): light element with four neon tubes and electronic controller, spy mirror, aluminium
• Monica Bonvicini, Don't Miss a Sec (2003-4): Two-way mirror structure, stainless-steel, toilet unit, concrete floor, aluminum, fluorescent lights.
• Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate (2004-6), Vertigo (2008)
• Robert Smithson, Mirror displacement, Cayuga Saltmine (1969), Corner Mirror with Coral (1969): "We have the habit--or the tradition--of calling what we see in a mirror a reflection or representation of soemthing else. Smithson would force upon us the knowledge that if we see it in a mirror, then that is where we see it: what we see has been displaced. An artist is thus not a maker of representations but an agent of displacements--an artificer, not a copyist. He is related to the world through discontinuity rather than imitation and filiation, and is more nearly an allegorist than a discoverer or forger of symbols." (Stephen Melville, "Robert Smithson: 'Aliteralist of the Imagination.'" from Seams p. 33)
• Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Etruscan (1976)

  

  Michelangelo Pistoletto, Seated Man (1962)

• Lucas Samaras, Mirrored Room (1966)
• Josiah McElheny, Modernity Circa 1962, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2004)
• Daniel Spoerri, Untitled (date?)
• Bertrand Lavier, Alba (1994)
• Jospehine Meckseper, Das Ende des Panoptikums II (2005)
• Dan Graham, Public Space/Two Audiences (1976)
• Donald Judd, Untitled (Six boxes) (1974)
• Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1965)
• Guiseppe Penone, Rovesciare i propri occhi (To reverse one's eyes) (1970)

  

  Olafur Eliassson, Mirror door (spectator) (2008), Mirror door (visitor) (2008)

• Carsten Höller, Mirror Carousel (2005)
• Katrin Sigurdardottir, Boiserie (detail) (2010)
• Allan Kaprow, Rates of Exchange (1975)
• Antonia Low, Gewicht des Sehens (2011)
• Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir, Mirror (2011)
• Art & Language, Untitled Painting (1965)
• Waltercio Caldas, Mirror of Light (1974)
• Philip Hausmeier, Untitled (Cabinet) (2007)
• Timm Ulrichs, Blinker II (2007/10)
• Richard Wilson, 20:50 (1987)
• Komar and Melamid, Stalin in Front of the Mirror (1982-3)
• William Kentridge, What Will Come (Has Already Come) (2007): video projection on a disc-shaped table, using anamorphosis to translate the projected image
• Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror 1 (1969)
• Gerhard Richter, study for 4 Glasscheiben (1966)

  

  Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror (1986)

• Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror (1986)
• Fernando Botero, Woman in Front of a Mirror (1986)
• Dennis Hopper, Double Standard (1962)
• Nan Goldin, Shiobhan in my Mirror, Berlin (1992)
• Georg Muche, Bauhaus: Bild 1926 (positiv-negativ) (1926)
• Daniel Rozin, Wooden Mirror (1999)
• Yayoi Kusama, Repetitive-Vision (1996)
• Mark Wallinger, Time and Relative Dimensions in Space (2001)
• Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project (2003)
• William Pope.L, A Vessel In A Vessel In A Vessel and So On (detail) (2007) installation view: mirror tray
• Claude Cahun, Self Portrait (1927)
• Tony Oursler, Reflection (1996)
• Kathryn Andrews, Bird Mirror (2011)
• Bruno Peinado, Sans Titre, Silence is Sexy (2004-9)
• Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Floor with Horizontal Mirror (1974)
• Ken Lum, Mirror Maze with 12 Signs of Depression (2002)
• Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still (1978)
• Matthew Day Jackson, Tensegrity Biotron (detail) (installation view at The Immeasurable Distance)(2009)
• Peter Campus, Interface (1972)
• Kimsooja, To Breathe—A Mirror Woman (2006)
• Rashid Johnson, The Shuttle (2011), The Moment of Creation (detail) (2011)
• Wade Guyton, Untitled (U-sculpture) (2011): Burnished steel
• Jeppe Hein, 360º Illusion (2007)
• Bina Baitel, Grimm (2011)
• Sarah Gerats, Her (2010)
• Numen/For Use (Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler & Nikola Radeljković), N-Light Membrane (2011)

Famous mirrors in art history:

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait (detail) (1434)

• Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait (detail) (1434): "Citing Claudel's description of the 'digestion' of empty interiors by the 'round eye of the mirror' in many Dutch paintings, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty remarked that 'this prehuman way of seeing things is the painter's way. More completely than lights, shadows, and reflections, the mirror anticipates, within things, the labor of vision...The mirror appears because I am seeing-visible [voyant-visible], because there is a reflexivity of the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity.' The curved mirror was especially powerful in this regard because its tactile dimension helps to collapse the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the Albertian painter's disembodied eye and the scene before him on the other side of the window-like canvas." (Martin Jay, "Satre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight," Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, p. 170)
• Hans Baldung Grien, Three Ages of Woman and Death (detail) (1511)
• Giovanni Bellini, Woman in Front of a Mirror (1515)
• Parmigianino, Self-portrait in convex mirror (circa 1524)
• Titian, Venus with a Mirror (circa 1555)
• Caravaggio, Narcissus (circa 1597-9)
• Peter Paul Rubens, Venus at the Mirror (circa 1614–5)

  

  Parmigianino, Self-portrait in convex mirror (circa 1524)

• Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (detail) (1656), Venus with a Mirror (circa 1648)
• Hall of Mirrors (Palace of Versailles) (1678-84)
• Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Daughter with a Mirror (1786)
• Ingres, Madame Paul-Sigisbert Moitessier (1856)
• Edgar Degas, The Dance Lesson (circa 1870)
• Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Nude standing before a Mirror (1897)
• Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror (1932)
• MC Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935)
• René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (1937)
• Norman Rockwell, Girl at the Mirror (1954)

  

  Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (detail) (1656)

• Joseph Kosuth, Art as Idea as Art (1967): not a mirror, but self-referential (see mise en abîme below)
• Gustave Courbet, The Artist's Studio (1855): again, not a mirror, but another famous self-referential mise en abîme, a representation of representation. There are a number of these in art history, but this is one of the more famous ones.

Common thematic uses of the mirror in art:

• introspection/identity formation (Jacques Lacan's mirror stage), e.g. Mirror, Mirror, Girl at the Mirror
• vanity, caring about superficial self-image, e.g. Three Ages of Woman and Death
• opulence (the mirror used to be a status symbol of wealth), e.g. Hall of Mirrors (Palace of Versailles)
• optical effects:
  • distortion, e.g. Vertigo, What Will Come (Has Already Come)
  • doubling or duplication of space, e.g. Gewicht des Sehens, Corner Mirror with Coral, The Etruscan, Public Space/Two Audiences
  • mise en abîme (placed into the abyss), e.g. Mirrored Room, Art as Idea as Art, Modernity Circa 1962, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely
  • reality v. image, e.g. La reproduction interdite
• Technical skill (subject of study), e.g. Hand with Reflecting Sphere, Self-portrait in convex mirror
• Reflexivity, subject/object (gazer/gazed) dichotomy, e.g. Las Meninas, Public Space/Two Audiences, Rovesciare i propri occhi (To reverse one's eyes)