On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Mirror, Blood Red
Gerhard Richter German
Not on view
Featured in Western painting since the Renaissance and approached by modernists as a literal self-reflexive device, the mirror was used in American Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s to trigger a new sort of perceptual self-presence. For Richter, making reverse-pigmented mirrors became a way to quietly challenge the avant-garde monochrome as well as to explore a counterpoint to the gestural, vivid exuberance of his own painting. "In the case of the colored mirrors, the result was a kind of cross between a monochrome painting and a mirror, a ‘Neither/Nor’—which is what I like about it." Encounter with this example simultaneously enables and convolutes a narcissistic desire for mirroring; spectators confront their own presence, saturated in the bloodred chroma.
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