Durchsicht — Glas in Reflexion: Adolf Luther · Shuster + Moseley · Leonie Harder

Glass is both carrier and boundary, medium and matter—transparent and yet divisive. It is a material that not only defines space but also challenges perception. In the exhibition Seethrough: Reflections on Glass, historical and contemporary positions intersect, each interpreting the material glass in strikingly different ways. In dialogue are Adolf Luther (1912–1990), the British artist duo Shuster+Moseley, and Hamburg-based artist Leonie Harder.

As early as the 1960s, Adolf Luther began using glass—most often in the form of concave mirrors—as a tool to question spatial and pictorial perception. Long before such concerns entered the broader discourse of contemporary art, Luther was a pioneer in exploring the immaterial, the invisible, and the energetic properties of space. His works are precise experiments in light, reflection, and perceptual thresholds. He developed a radically dynamic approach that moved beyond fixed perspectives, emphasizing instead a fluid interplay of energy, space, and perception. He described his process as one of “dematerialization,” using the destruction of glass as a means to liberate light as a visual material. In this conception, light becomes the true medium of art—an ephemeral, experiential phenomenon that only comes into form through the viewer's presence.

Shuster+Moseley approach glass through a poetic and conceptual practice. Their works are shaped by a critical engagement with screen- and lens-based technologies, examining how embodiment is experienced in the digital age. Central to their approach are the notions of spectrality and exposure—of what is revealed and what resists visibility. Their immersive glass installations point to the ambivalence of presence and absence, of surface and depth. Many of the concerns that Adolf Luther explored in the pre-digital era—light as material, the invisible as subject, space as an energetic field—are revisited by Shuster+Moseley in a contemporary context shaped by the Technocene. In their work, glass is not simply a material but a threshold between body, image, and world.

Leonie Harder offers a different lens on the notion of glass—treating it less as a visible substance than as an imagined threshold between interior and exterior space. In her photographic series Outsight, glass is never directly shown; its presence is inferred through subtle plays of light, folds of curtains, and spatial cues that suggest a pane might exist between viewer and outside world. The works were taken in institutional settings—museums such as Hamburger Bahnhof, the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, or the Hamburger Kunsthalle—places where one typically looks at exhibits, not at windows. These peripheral, overlooked architectural elements become central in Harder’s images, opening quiet spaces for projection and imagination: What lies beyond? What remains unseen? How do absence and framing shape our experience of space and memory? Harder’s broader artistic practice explores perspective, memory, temporality, and the spatial dynamics of looking. Her work investigates how we store and retrieve images—mentally, visually, materially. Outsight becomes a subtle, poetic reflection on the invisible within the visible—an invitation to consider how what is omitted from the frame might shape our inner image-worlds.

This exhibition opens a dialogue on the invisible potential of glass—on the relationships between light, space, and perception. In the interplay between the three artistic positions, glass emerges not merely as a material, but as a concept oscillating between technology, architecture, and poetics. Seethrough: Reflections on Glass invites us to look beyond the boundaries of the visible—to see space not only as something to be observed, but as a medium through which reflection and perception unfold.