[Still-Life Abstraction]

This still life of a sheet of glass, a mirror, and a half-filled water glass, all strongly lit from one side, is characteristic of the Czech artist’s signature style of making a photograph of complex space, created with a mirror, an object, and light. Although softly printed like Pictorialist photographs from earlier in the century, Funke’s photograph shares the abstract complexity of the most advanced modernist experiments that were just then emerging, works such as photograms by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy.