Art Mirrors Art

Ingel Fallstedt - Kvinna vid spegel {Woman by a Mirror} (c.1880s)

Bahram Gur and the Persian Princess in the White Pavilion, a miniature from Haft Payk by Nizami Gouache and gold on paper, ~ 15x22 cm, c. 1800s, Qajar Iran Bahram Gur, also known as Bahram V, was the legendary king who ruled Iran in 420-438. In Nizami's story, written much later, in 12th century, he marries seven princesses from the seven regions of the world and builds a different coloured pavilion for each.

The seven pavilions correspond to seven days, seven colours and seven planets. During one week he visits one princess each night, and each tells him a story.

This pavilion is White, so it's also Friday - and Venus (the name of the princess is Dorosti, or Diroste).

Which makes the black rectangle on a wall likely a mirror - of course, not the 5th-century mirror but a 19th-century wall mirror inserted into a legendary setting:

Richard Claremont - What Memory Kept (2026)

Louise Bourgeois - Toi et moi (2002), as presented at the exhibition The Way We Live Now in the George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece.

The Bourgeois' piece consists of the mirror but also two chairs - the idea was that the mirror would give back not an accurate but instead distorted images of the Other. At least it was the idea of the artist - I don't think the curators allow people to use these chars.

Bourgeois coined the idea of this installation already in the 1980s but it was completed only in 2002 - when she was 90 (!). It's one of her last works with large mirrors, to my knowledge.

The picture below is from the vernissage exhibition organized by Hauser & Wirth in Monaco: