Jonty Hurwitz's sculptures reveal themselves in a cylindrical mirror

I have seen artists draw pictures that become unskewed in a mirrored cylinder, but this is the first time I've seen a sculptor use this technique. Beautiful.

The Skewed, Anamorphic Sculptures and Engineered Illusions of Jonty Hurwitz

(Via Matt Richardson in Boing Boing G+ community)

• [euansmith]

  I’ve seen painting of Charles Edward Stewart (the patron saint of wife beating drunkards) like this; created to allow clandestine veneration of their subject, but where is Hypno-toad the subject of an authoritarian crackdown?

• [theophrastvs]

  impressive effort.  (i think it was a popular parlor amusement back in the heady zoetrope days)  unfortunately, still can’t circle the mirror around the sculpture to play ‘rotate the frog’.

• [victorriviera]

  Well this is ooooold already, maybe you should take a walk at the viennes museum of historical art- was already done way earlier in baroque times AND it was done by hand at that times, it is called “anamorphic painting” started in 1533 with Hans Hohlbein supposebly- maybe even earlier…
  http://nvmdblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/anamorphezeichnung2.jpg?w=632

  • [Mark_Frauenfelder]

    Supposebly you read the post?

• [noahmckinnon]

  Pretty of the same reaction I have when I see an Escher. Neat, but not much more than a technical exercise.

  • [Mark_Frauenfelder]

    I like this Escher woodcut a lot: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-B5Ju42B_JdE/T-E6v7ijsvI/AAAAAAAABt0/k_EKMGMs2aQ/s1600/escher,+m+c+puddle+1952.jpg

• [Digilante]

  I recommend a review of the works of the South African artist William Kentridge if you like this sort of thing.

• [jimkirk]

  This is calling out for some 3D printer object manipulation.

• [TheOven]

  Nice but why model the back side? Seems what they did was stretch an existing 3D model and just 3d printed it.

  EDIT: Now that I’ve checked out his other work, I can see that the whole of the pieces (the frog is the least interesting to me) work very well in 3D as their own objects. That they form a picture in a reflection is also neat, but the sculptures are quite interesting alone.

• [timquinn]

  Here is a big clue for you new comers to art gazing; “art is not a competition.” You may use it as a mantra if it helps to keep it in mind.

• [swankgd]

  Salvador Dali made several of these.

• [Cowicide]

  I like this, but I love Robert Lazzarini’s work.

• [CJR]

  Yes – this was classic way to do subversive paintings – from the politically subversive to the pornographic. The paintings looked like smeared pain until you put the reflective cylinder in the center and looked at the reflection – then poof, a painting of the House of Lancaster hidden from Cromwell’s men! I first saw this during an episode of Lovejoy Mysteries…

  • [Once Dead Flesh]

    i prefer smeared pain to subversive art… sorry.

• [the_dannobot]

  Cool!  There is a local Ghent beer Gruut that has something similar… Every Belgian beer is served in it’s own glass, this particular beer the glass has a little mirror on it, and comes with a special coaster.  The coaster has a design on it that when you line it up with the glass, the reflection in the mirror is a girl striking a pose
  The beer is really good too ;)

• [timquinn]

  not 3-d. nice try, come again.

• [SCK]

  Really? You think so? My comment was on the artistic quality of work utilizing optical effects, and not concerned with the objects’ nature as three-dimensional or not.

• [Bruno]

   off-topic promotion