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This dissertation considers the proliferation of mirrors and reflective materials in art since the 1960s through four case studies. By analyzing the mirrored and reflective work of Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Dan Graham and Robert Smithson within the context of the artists’ larger oeuvre and also the theoretical and self-reflective writing that surrounds each artist’s work, the relationship between the wide use of industrially-produced materials and the French theory that dominated artistic discourse for the past thirty years becomes clear. Chapter 2 examines the work of Robert Rauschenberg, noting his early interest in engaging the viewer’s body in his work – a practice that became standard with the rise of Minimalism and after. Additionally, the theoretical writing of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides insight into the link between art as a mirroring practice and physically engaged viewer. Chapter 3 considers the questions of medium and genre as they arose in the wake of Minimalism, using the mirrors and photo-based paintings of Gerhard Richter as its focus. It also addresses the particular way that Richter weaves the motifs and concerns of traditional painting into a rhetoric of the death of painting which strongly implicates the mirror, ultimately opening up Richter’s career to a psychoanalytic reading drawing its force from Jacques Lacan’s writing on the formation of the subject. Chapter 4 extends these considerations to address the role of the viewer and the question of time and history through an analysis of the work and writing of Dan Graham, which draw both on Merleau-Ponty’s and Lacan’s theories of vision. And finally, Chapter 5 focuses on the work, writings and aesthetic theory of Robert Smithson, addressing the way that Smithson explicitly put his art and writing into an interdependent relationship, insisting that art is ultimately displaced into writing. Taken together, the case studies describe the way reflection, both as a practice and as a material choice, defined some the most notable trends in the artistic discourse of the last forty years.