The Substance of Light > A Collaborative Between @CuadroArt @PaceGallery > November 6- January 6

The Substance of Light is a collaborative project between Pace London and Cuadro Fine Art.

This exhibition, the first by Pace in the Middle East, features iconic works by four of the most significant artists who have historically worked in light: Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell. The fourteen works in the exhibition explore the contrast between artists who seek to capture light’s spiritual and phenomenological quality with those who access light’s cultural history, from the glare of the neon sign to the glow of street lights.

In the early 1960s, while much of America and Europe was obsessed with the new wave of Pop Artists, Southern California quietly gave rise to a very different aesthetic revolution, the so-called Light and Space movement. Two artists in particular, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, began to combine ideas from radical advances in perceptual psychology and new philosophical inquiries into the nature of human experience with the immersive abstraction that had been pioneered by artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.

The result was a new approach to art that replaced the object with a phenomenon. Finding traditional painting and sculpture too restrictive and self-contained, this group of young artists turned to the actual “substance” that makes all art possible: light. Irwin and Bell were the first to make objects and installations that were purely designed to manipulate the light in front of or around the viewer, and it was one of Irwin’s first students, James Turrell, who sought to create artworks solely from light, giving substance and physical form to light itself.

Since those early days, artists around the world have embraced light as a medium to create a powerful art experience in the viewer. To transform this most elusive material has been the ultimate challenge for many, and when they succeed, the light, the shape and created forms dissolve the veneer of centuries of painting and sculpture to reveal the essential truth of art.

Highlights from The Substance of Light include seven reflective holograms by Turrell, made between 2006 and 2008. In these works, Turrell explores the mass and physicality of light, a subject he first addressed in his seminal Projection Pieces from the 1960s. Here, that physicality is generated using the optical space of dichromate reflection holograms. While holograms are traditionally used to make an illusion in which light becomes the means through which a three-dimensional object is depicted, Turrell instead uses holography to examine the phenomenon of the light itself, capturing its normally fleeting qualities and allowing light to become the object: “My work is about space and light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it with vision. It is about seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into fire.” James Turrell, 2010.

The exhibition will also feature three of Robert Irwin’s fluorescent light installations from 2009 and 2011. Irwin wraps fluorescent tubes in as many as ten coloured gels to attain a range of hues. He mounts the lights in vertical groupings on the wall, creating an installation that experiments with the perceptual qualities of light, playing with rhythm, texture, densities, temperature, and chromatic relationships. Like all of Irwin’s oeuvre, the works respond to the specific circumstances and conditions of each project site that he takes on, transforming art into a “conditional activity” that “exists in the real world”.

Iconic works by Dan Flavin and Larry Bell will also be on view. Uniquely situated outside the mediums of paintings and sculpture, Flavin’sUntitled (to Bob and Pat Rohm) (1969), is made of inverted green, red, and yellow fluorescent neon tubes installed in a square to create a powerful and harmonious structure that interacts with the architecture of the gallery. This work has been included in museum exhibitions worldwide and was most recently featured in the Seattle Art Museum’s 2009 exhibition Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78.The exhibition will also include Bell’s Untitled (1970), one of the artist’s seminal cubes made from mineral-coated glass. The work was shown at the Hayward Gallery, London in 11 Los Angeles Artists (1971), and at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris in the ground-breaking exhibition Los Angeles – Paris (1966). With its clean lines, the box seems to encase an internal light and confirms Bell’s position as one of the leading artists of Minimalism.