‘Encoded Mirrors’ by Florian Born is an installation made up of 1600 tiny mirrors that reflect colours from the surrounding room, turning reflections into pixelated images. The installation demonstrates to art enthusiasts the underlying connections between master abstract artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian by transforming, like a magic mirror, the reflection of a Kandinsky painting into a Mondrian.

The works of master abstract artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian differ from each other considerably in form. While the paintings of Kandinsky are characterized by a vibrant and swirling nature, the works of Mondrian have a distincly geometric and ‘pixelated’ nature. What the two masters shared however was a common colour theory with the three primary colours -– red, blue and yellow – being essential to their work.

To demonstrate the connection between the artists, Encoded Mirrors takes Kandinsky’s painting „Yellow-Red-Blue“ and turns it into Mondrian’s “Composition with big red square, yellow, black, grey and blue,” just by using the installation’s array of mirrors.

As Born explains: “Every mirror on the surface is tilted to a specific angle to reflect a certain colour of the Kandinsky painting hanging on the wall. If a person stands at the correct distance and height to the surface, the image of the Mondrian painting appears in the mirrors. The whole image is just constructed by redirecting the sight to different spots located on the Kandinsky painting.”

Encoded Mirrors was developed as part of the University of Arts Berlin’s 2015 Digital Klasse.