Colour - Surface - Light

COLOUR - SURFACE - LIGHT source: Sculpture Today – Judith Collins

Wolfgang Laib – Pollen from hazelnut tree 1993

-raw pollen as a substance for making sculpture, both as a coloured pigment and as a structural material.  He lives near a small village in southern Germany whose inhabitants traditionally spend from February to September every year collecting pollen from blossoms in the surrounding meadows and woods, usually pine, hazelnut and dandelion. Laib finds pollen beautiful, ephemeral and dense. They are extremely vulnerable and fragile, as their title hints. Laib spreads large carpets of pollen on the gallery floor, and these ephemeral rectangles recall American colour-field paintings.

-black and white was considered as not colours by Newton, Goethe proposed that they can – using them as moral comparisons between darkness and light. The social philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925) edited Goethe’s papers and believed that black carbon was the primary matter from which everything else comes, and he backed up this belief by invoking the biblical statement about God creating the world by separating light from darkness, which implies that darkness precedes light.

David Nash, who works with wood, is an admirer of the work of Steiner, and he began in 1975 to char the surface of some of his pieces, either by placing them in a fire or stove, or using a blowtorch, changing the surface layer of the wood from a vegetable material into a mineral – carbon.

Work: Vessel and Volume 1988 – is a charred sculpture comprising two parts, the smaller of which has been cut out of the larger. Nash has discovered that the black surface distances the viewer so that they experience the shape of the sculpture before they acknowledge that it is made of wood. The smell of the charring lingers, and provides the viewer with another sensory experience.

In complete contrast to this chromatic display are works using glass and mirrors, transparent and translucent panels and polished surfaces, which reflect, diffuse and transmit light. Many artists who work in this way are based on the west coast of America, centred around Los Angeles. The California Light and Space group of artist emerged in the 1960s, and included Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Bruce Nauman. Bell began to use refractive and reflective materials such as mirrors and tinted glass, and in doing so introduced a new ingredient into his sculpture: the viewer, whose image was combined or superimposed on that of other viewers and reflections of the surrounding environment. Viewers thus became aware that they were the primary objects of perception, and could see themselves caught in the act of looking at a work of art. This slightly unnerving condition altered their experience of the work of art and drew them unwittingly into a web of phenomenological ideas.   The popular reading among the California Light and Space group was Phenomenology of Perception 1962 by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.     

Larry Bell 6x6x4 AB 1995/ Made for Arolsen 1992

Bell started as a painter, but since 1962 has made glass and mirrored sculptures of refined simplicity. He began with boxes and cubes and than moved on to making works of an environmental nature.

Robert Irwin – began to use new materials in order to work with light and space. He, like Bell, was interested in materials that possessed the capacity to dissolve form and eliminate the object. He too began as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but gave it up in 1970 in favour of environmental works that manipulate and augment the viewer’s apprehension of the space in which he stands.

Work: 1234, 1992

Irwin works with ephemeral and transparent materials, such as nylon scrim, nylon organza, tape and string, creating veils and wall divisions that alter the viewer’s experience of light and space. Existing windows, doors and lights offer a soft, diffused light onto the space, so that this atmospheric work appears as though seen through a gentle fog.

James Turrell is fascinated by the effect of light on space and how this affects the viewer’s perception. He studied perceptual psychology and mathematics at college, and became interested in Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the relationship between perception and illusion. His career began with gallery installations in which light was perceived as a physical, almost tactile presence (work: Catso, Red 1967), but, following his skyspaces, he moved on to working with natural light, out of doors.

Dan Graham – Two Different Anamorphic Surfaces 2000

Robert Morris – made regular geometrical forms such as cubes, using glass and mirrors

Katy Schimert – The Sun 1998 (uses colour glass – mythological themes including real and imaginary characters from the mast and the present)

Roni Horn  - (uses glass – water themes)

Shirazeh Houshiary – Isthmus 1992

Alison Wilding – Assembly 1991 – Wilding uses copper, brass, galvanized and leaded steel, along with wood, usually oak, rubber sheeting and stone. Her titles reference water, fluidity and light and her materials contrast transparency and opacity, light and shadow, weight and immateriality.

Rachel Whiteread –Water Tower 1998

Another band of artists who use light in formal, literal and phenomenal ways. 1960s – Chryssa, Dan Flavin, Keith Sonnier, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth and Bridgitte Kowanz – all experimented with neon and fluorescent tubes, introducing a radical new material into sculpture.

David Batchelor – The Spectrum of Brick Lane, 2003.

Erwin Redl – Matrix II, 2000-3 his work is concerned with ‘how abstraction becomes a physical sensation’. He works with lines and grids and recently has been exploring LEDs as a sculptural medium. These tiny, bright lights are commonly used in digitally programmed arrays to create simple repeating texts, usually of welcome or warning. Redl liberates the electronic components from their communicative function to create large scale architectural installations. Stringing together thousands of LEDs, he creates walls of light transforming a medium best known for conveying ephemeral, digitized information into powerful visual interventions.

Ann Veronica Janssens – 16 views of Blue, Red and Yellow, 2001.

Formless dematerialized works made from coloured fog. She has written of her work as ‘places for the capture light’, and states that she wants to push back the limits of perception. When viewers enter one of her coloured fog installations, which take place both indoors and outdoors, they are immediately aware of the precarious position of other viewers. Her Blue, Red and Yellow is a cuboid with translucent walls covered in transparent films of colour. The cube was filled with dense mist, which altered as the viewer moved through it ‘in a dematerialized coloured abstraction’.

Olafur Eliasson – The Weather Project, 2003. (Tate modern – turbine hall – hundred of mono frequency lamps, the kind used in street lighting, and he clothed the ceiling with mirrors. A fine mist hung in the air, which added to the intensity of the experience, lifting the spirits of Tate’s winter visitors.)

Similar aesthetic outlook to Janssens, and uses light, heat, wind, fire, steam and ice – basically natural phenomena – in urban settings. His ongoing preoccupation is the study of ways in which humans perceive natural phenomena, and his intriguing large-scale works allow the viewer to examine what they are experiencing: ‘The benefit in disclosing the means with which I am working is that it enables the viewer to understand the experience itself as a construction and so, to a higher extent, allow them to question and evaluate the impact this experience has on them.’