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, the mirror indexed the instability of perception, while inviting a viewer to participate in the purported endgame of late modernism.

Alongside the well-known international artists 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.

Touring to: University Art Gallery, Verge Gallery, and Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney 4 January–2 May 2010
Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide 14 May–16 July 2010

Mirror Mirror is accompanied by a publication featuring essays by Ann Stephen, Andrew MacNamara, and Keith Broadfoot and an anthology of artists’ writings. The publication has been supported by Gordon Darling Foundation.