Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection

An exciting, unexpected, and beautiful encounter with one collector’s deeply personal assemblage of works.

Since the 1980s, Mickey Cartin has assembled a remarkable collection of objects and art-Renaissance and modernist paintings, master prints, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, and more. Exploring the theory behind collecting art and how Cartin’s approach to collecting diverges from common practices, this publication offers a unique perspective on an intimate practice. Unconcerned with hewing to specific categories, time periods, or media, Cartin’s collection-which includes the likes of Josef Albers, Sol Lewitt, and Forrest Bess-creates active combinations and disrupts homogeneity, privileging the drive of curiosity.

A documentation of the celebrated exhibition Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection at David Zwirner, New York, in 202, this catalogue includes additional artworks from Cartin’s trove along with views of his home, conveying how he lives with these various types of work. Cartin selected each work in the exhibition and catalogue as a reflection of his deep connections with the many artists represented therein. The conversation between Cartin and David Leiber illuminates the tensions between study and instinct, reading versus experiencing, as well as the influences and figures that inform his personal, curatorial practice. With an introduction by the curator of the Cartin Collection, Steven Holmes, and a text from the art historian Luke Syson, this inspiring volume is a spirited investigation of a very different method of and approach to collecting.

Author Biography

About the Cartin Collection
The Cartin Collection includes nearly two thousand works in various media, including early Netherlandish painting, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, incunabula, nineteenth-century paintings and drawings, and an extensive collection of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century art. In 2005, the Cartin Collection began to produce exhibitions in partnership with museums, alternative spaces, and galleries in New York, Boston, Miami, and Hartford, as well as in Paris and Berlin. The collection continues to loan extensively across all fields, periods, and media.

Steven Holmes has been the curator of the Cartin Collection since 2005. From 2009 to 2012, he was an adjunct curator at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, and from 2000 to 2005 he was the director of Visual Arts and Public Programming at Real Art Ways in Hartford. David Leiber, a partner at David Zwirner in New York, works closely with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Estate of Diane Arbus, and major collectors of work by Giorgio Morandi, as well as the contemporary artist Liu Ye. Luke Syson is the fourteenth director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England. From 2012 to 2019, he was the chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where he led the complete refurbishment of the British Galleries, which opened in March 2020.