Archive

Uta Barth (Germany), Larry Bell (US), Carol Bove (Switzerland), Sarah Braman (US), Tacita Dean (UK), Olafur Eliasson (Denmark), Sam Falls (US), Jeppe Hein (Denmark), Robert Irwin (US), Ann Veronica Janssens (UK), Spencer Finch (US), James Welling (US)

Curated by Melissa E. Feldman

Bringing the work of a select group of current-generation artists together with that of two pioneers of West Coast American minimalism, this exhibition examined the impact of California Light and Space art on artists working today.

Robert Irwin and Larry Bell are two of California’s best-known artists. In this exhibition, two of their signature objects – one of Irwin’s iconic discs and a Larry Bell cube – signalled the radical and ground-breaking art made in California in the 1960s and 70s.

Taking inspiration from this art, works by the more contemporary artists in the exhibition explored the perceptual and psychological aspects of seeing in optically inventive forms, structures, spaces, images and narratives. Some of these works cause profound shifts in our perception by the simplest and most transparent of means – coloured light gels, mist, the deployment of after images. Others use tinted glass, mirror, resins and highly-coloured metals.

Two films engaged the viewer in a subtle exploration of perception and the slowing down of time, while photographs used light as both subject matter and material. Together the artists in this exhibition, like those associated with California Light and Space, embraced the temporal and unstable nature of subjective experience. These are the very ways in which California’s minimalism differed from the literalness, pure objecthood, and materiality of New York’s.

Supported by The Idlewild Trust.

Download the Exhibition Guide

Download the Bulletin

Listen to Another Minimalism: Curator’s Talk with Melissa E. Feldman

Images: Ruth Clark