Bending Light

Bringing together a focused selection of works that employ light as their primary medium, Bending Light charts the evolving affinities between California artists Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell and their Minimalist contemporary on the East Coast, Dan Flavin. The exhibition presents recent works by these three key figures of the Light and Space movement—centered in Southern California beginning from the 1960s onward—in spatial and perceptual dialogue with an installation by Flavin, a New York-based artist long recognized as central to the canon of Minimalism. The exhibition will be on view at Pace Gallery in Seoul, Korea, from June 5 to August 14.

Paying homage to the unwritten artistic exchange between California and New York in the 1960s and after, the exhibition presents cast urethane sculptures by Peter Alexander from 2019 alongside an “unlit” fluorescent sculpture by Robert Irwin from the same year. Together, these works are juxtaposed with a 2018 installation by James Turrell embedded in the gallery wall nearby. The works by these three seminal Light and Space artists exist in dialogue with Dan Flavin’s 1984 light installation, installed in the far corner of the gallery with a single fluorescent tube projecting out into space. Each work illuminates and reflects the others around it—both literally and metaphorically—making visible the shared aesthetic concerns that circulated and cross-pollinated among artists on both coasts in the decades following the 1960s.

“New York certainly was the precedent that I was familiar with in the mid-Sixties,” recounts Peter Alexander in a 1995 interview, “if for no other reason [than] that all the words come out of New York, for whatever they're worth.” Alexander’s skepticism toward words—his challenge of the authority of art criticism—is echoed in the work of Irwin and Turrell, but it also reflects an attitude consistent with Minimalists like Flavin, who were similarly concerned with the limits of language. Irwin remains famous for his dictum that “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” while Turrell has often compared the experience of his light-based works to an experience “outside” or “beyond” language. The perceptual experience generated by Flavin’s fluorescent installations is similarly description-defying.

In the mid-1960s, resins and plastics represented an exciting space-age material closely associated with the aeronautical and defense industries in Southern California, where James Turrell was raised by a father who worked as an aeronautical engineer. Turrell’s early exposure to aeronautics and aviation while growing up in Pasadena led him to obtain a pilot’s license by the age of sixteen. Later, his artistic practice became deeply informed by an experience he would come to call “inhabiting the sky”—his term for the embodied sensory perception that one achieves when “soaring” through the atmosphere while piloting small aircraft.

From 1967 onward, Turrell began creating artworks consisting entirely of light, projecting luminous shapes into and across space, eschewing even the modicum of material support offered by a bulb. Atlantis, Medium Rectangle Glass (2019) belongs to a series of works that represents the culmination of his lifelong interest in dematerializing the art object into an experience of pure luminosity, and in so doing capturing the chromatic wonder of the heavens. A luminous portal cut directly into the gallery wall, Turrell’s work brings about a shifting radiance suggestive of nothing so much as the changing celestial tapestry of the sky itself. For Turrell—a quaker—the use of light is also suggestive of the meditative, the revelatory, and the transcendental.

What links the artists in Bending Light is this harnessing and re-deploying of luminosity—whether ambient or generated by the work itself—not only as radiant material, but as a catalyst for contemplative and perceptual awareness. Both for canonical East Coast Minimalists like Flavin and for the Light and Space artists who emerged from the California scene around the same time, the phenomenal and experiential quality of light could never be fully reduced to language: it represented an absolute and pure form of presence, the most basic and minimal quality of visibility that preceded linguistic or conceptual explanation. If words could never be entirely avoided, they would nevertheless exist at a radical remove, trailing far behind the direct experience of the work itself.