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11 Panes
Gerhard Richter German
Not on view
Glass, a material that generally protects or enshrines works of art, here assumes its own visual presence, freed from the function of invisibility. The use of the specific number eleven, however, signals a formal intention to distinguish this work from the innumerable panes through which we stare daily. Glass’s architectural promises for social transparency—celebrated by German architects, poets, and philosophers in the early twentieth century—appear in this agglomeration as mere remnants of that utopian thought. With its stacked identical panes that produce multiple and dispersed reflections, it confronts the role of the spectator by simultaneously enabling and thwarting the narcissistic drive for mirroring.
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