Light and Space by jjoonii

Light And Space

Table of Contents 4 Light And Space Movement: Merger of Art And Tech

12 Robert Irwin’s Ambient Odyssey

20 Quantum leap For Mary Corse

24 Light Imitating Art

30 Minimalism, Light, Space, Object

40 Olafur Eliasson: Elemental Mastery Of Space And Light

By Ian Wallace

Light And Space Movement: Merger of Art And Tech

Mary Corse, Untitled (White Light Series) Acrylic on woon, Plexiglas and fluorescent tubes Robert Irwin, Untitled (Dawn to Dark) installation art

How could artists in the second half of

a loosely defined sensibility than an

terity and material purity of Minimalism

refer to the work of artists who playfully

the 20th century respond to the aus-

that had swept America in the wake of Abstract Expressionism and at the tail end of the Modern period? What possible counter could there be for New

York’s particular breed of sculpture, in which the artwork was conceived as a

hermetic physical presence, exempli-

fied by the massive geometric fabrications of Richard Serra, Donald Judd,

organized collective. The term came to flirted with Op art, Minimalism, and

geometric abstraction with an emphasis on transcendentalist levity, boundary-dissolving luminescence, and—in place of New York Minimalism’s

hard-edged industrial materials—an

embrace of cutting-edge space-age fabrication methods.

Robert Morris, et al?

The 1971 exhibition at the UCLA Art

In the 1960s, as Minimalism was quickly

Light, Space,” which included works by

becoming the de rigueur style of American art’s intelligentsia, another group of young artists across the country were

engaging with the same stripped-down aesthetic ideals, but awash in Southern

California vibes. Similar to the New York

Minimalists, the Light and Space movement, as it is now known, was closer to

Gallery “Transparency, Reflection,

Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Craig Kau-

ffman, John McCracken, and Peter

Alexander, was art history’s formative introduction to the informal move-

ment. But aside from James Turrell’s

popular maximalist light show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2013, wherein the artist transformed the

museum’s famous rotunda into a giant light installation, Light and Space, as a whole, hasn’t been explored in a major exhibition.

More often, it’s represented as a divergent branch of

Minimalism rather than its own cogent strain of American art. Muddying the waters even more is the fact that many Light and Space artists were also included under the

greater rubric of Minimalism and showed in exhibitions like “Primary Structures” in New York. Nevertheless, there are

particularities to Light and Space that emphasize that the movement deserves a spotlight of its own.

Light and Space artists embraced, rather than

denouncing, the “theatricality” of Minimalist sculpture that critic Michael Fried described in his important 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.” Emphasizing an

immersive interaction with the work of art that called dramatic attention to the personal experience of the viewer, Light and Space artists’ creations ranged

from the all-encompassing, mind-bending expanses of Doug Wheeler to sculptures made from materials that seem to change in appearance as the observer moves around them—or that use transparency and reflection to make ambiguous the relationship be-

tween the art object and its environment, as in Robert

Irwin’s transparent, effervescent constructions. Equally important, if lesser known, are Helen Pashgian’s

tubular sci-fi-esque columns, designed to be walked around by the viewer in succession.

In Light and Space works, neon, glass, resin, acrylic, and fluorescent lights—materials that were also used in Pop and Minimalist sculpture—frequently appear. But Light and Space artists used these materials specifically to

emphasize how light reflects off of, passes through, or

bends around them. As James Turrell said, in a frequently quoted aphorism, “There’s a sweet deliciousness to seeing yourself see something.”

Whereas the east coast branch of Minimalism had ambitions to become a universalizing sensibility, Light and Space was indu-

bitably tied to its foundations in California, and especially in Los Angeles. “California Minimalism” and “Finish Fetish” are both

alternative names for the movement, and for good reason. The allure of waxed surfboards and gleaming automobiles in the

( top left ) Doug Wheeler, Synthetic Desert III, 2017 , at Guggenheim

( top bottom ) Robert Irwin, Untitled instatllation art

( bottom ) Robert Irwin, Untitled instatllation art

California sun were aesthetic touchstones for the light, reflective, and

visually beautific quality of Light and Space artists’ works.

monly used for making surfboards.

Likewise, DeWain Valentine began his career working in boat shops. Re-

flective or transparent epoxy, lacquer,

and plastic materials not only provide lustrous, lucid surfaces; they also act as screens that mediate the experience of the exhibition space, rather

than defining it the way Robert Morris’s minimalist boxes did.

After World War II, technologies and

fabricating facilities that had sprung

up to support the war effort were newly

available for specialty manufacturers’—

including artists’—use. These so-called “cottage industries” along the West

Coast specialized in technologies, like vacuum-forming and fiberglass molding, that were put to use early on by

companies like the publisher of artists’ multiples Gemini G.E.L., as well as by individual artists.

West Coast artists’ pioneering

encounters with such cutting-edge

Robert Irwin, Untitled instatllation art

fabricating technologies directly

to postmodernist deconstruction.

that gave rise to Silicon Valley’s

associated with feminist art and

influenced the mix of Zen and tech techno-organicism, evident in the designs of companies like Apple

since the 1980s. The glowing white

monochromatic objects made by Mary Corse, for example, which resemble pieces of a spaceship stage set,

predate Apple’s minimalist designs by

several decades. Likewise, Larry Bell’s translucent boxes wouldn’t look out of place alongside high-tech accoutrements of the 21st century.

Light and Space proved to be a

formative influence for many Post-Minimalist artists of the latter half of the 20th century as a way of charting

alternatives to the dead-end finality of

Minimalism, offering a natural pathway

Artists like Judy Chicago, who is

conceptualism in the ‘70s, actually got her start in making Light and

Space-inspired fogged domes in Los

Angeles. The movement’s long-lasting influence is also present in the work of contemporary artists like Sophia Collier, whose convincingly aque-

ous-looking sculptures were shown at Art Basel in 2012. Meanwhile, an

ever-popular permanent installation at MoMA PS1 in New York is James

Turrell’s Infinity Room, a simple and evocative piece made by cutting a hole in the museum’s ceiling and

leaving it open to the air. Although, of

course, when the weather’s bad—as it is for at least half of the year, here on

the country’s grayer coast—the piece must be closed to the public.

Robert Irwin’s

By Lawrence Weschler

Ambient Odyssey

At 91 years of age, Robert Irwin, one of the founding masters of California’s experientially-pitched Light and Space movement, is currently staging what may well be his final gallery show of new work at Pace. “Just look at me,” he said, by phone, from his San Diego living room. “Man, that New York show is obviously my swan song.” And indeed, over the past half-decade Mr. Irwin has been so racked by physical ailments, especially near-harrowing chronic back pain, that he hardly ever leaves his house, except occasionally to venture to his studio with the aid of his assistants. It has been years since he has been able to visit any of his recent exhibitions, notably including his legendary transformation of a dilapidated onetime military hospital at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Robert Irwin, Untitled instatllation art

The Pace show consists of yet another departure. Over those same 15 years, Irwin had been deploying ever more complex variations on long color-saturated fluorescent light shafts vertically mounted in varying configurations against white walls or translucent scrim expanses. To attain their often astonishing hues, he’s been meticulously wrapping the individual bulbs in layers of theatrical gels, sometimes more than 10 thick. When displaying the arrays, some of the bulbs would be turned on, some not — many some of the time, others never — with the look of those arrays changing radically with each iteration.

Robert Irwin, Untitled instatllation art

All the while Mr. Irwin has been noticing how some of the bulbs looked especially sumptuous or enigmatic merely turned off, and so this time out, he has limited himself to their palette. The bulbs are still mounted on long gleaming white electrical fixtures, but those canisters contain no wires, and the bulbs are never turned on. Hence the artist’s typically bland and clunky name for the show — “Unlights” — and his insistence that these works are “drawings,” a term meant to suggest a certain sense of improvisation and free play. The results are ravishingly gorgeous, and compoundingly confounding. For Mr. Irwin has also been adding all manner of variations to his usual bag of tricks: thin full-color zips down the sides of some of the fixtures; in others, inner sleeves along the fixture walls are occasionally painted black or gray or lighter gray, and likewise with the intervening wall itself between the fixtures, and there are subtle vertical stripes running down the length of some of the bulbs. What at first might seem an airy, even Zenlike succession of shafts, gives way to a near-delirium of zany variation. And in many ways, his is a summary achievement. From the early 1960s onward, Mr. Irwin had been engaged in a successive phenomenological reduction of the art object, insisting that he was pushing cubism’s most famous achievement, the collapse of figure and ground, yet further forward: for how, he demanded to know, could that achievement be limited to the action within the frame of the painting — what about the shadows on the wall? Why should they be considered less figure than the object they grounded? With his eerie disk paintings of the mid-60s, the shadows emanating behind the outthrusting shadow-colored disk were deemed just as important as the disk itself. To those accusing him of aesthetic nihilism, Mr. Irwin would counter that far from reducing the

figure to the status of the ground, he was rather raising the ground up to the status of the figure. And yet the curious thing here with this new series is that Mr. Irwin has introjected those very same shadows from the contours into the very centers of his expanding arrays. Similarly with color. For the longest time, from the mid-60s well through the ’70s and beyond, in order to focus his argument Mr. Irwin had pretty much limited his palette to white and black and scrim-gray. But after having arrived at Point Zero, as he called it, in the late ’70s, insisting that perception itself in all its marvel and ramifications, absent any objectlike expression, ought now be seen as the sole true subject of art, he presently emerged on the far side: in the early 1980s he was chosen for one of the most expensive and expansive public art commissions, the Central Garden at the Getty in Los Angeles. And with the thousands of flowers

he auditioned for that project, color itself came flooding back into his purview in all its dazzling variation — between flowers, of course, but even within individual petals and stems. And the sorts of things he limned along that Robert Irwin, Untitled instatllation art

Brentwood hillside are rampantly evident in the uncanny colors and combinations of colors in this possibly final project.

For the longest time, all through the ’60s, the ’70s and into the ’80s, Mr. Irwin wouldn’t allow the photographic reproduction of any of his pieces, arguing that photography captured everything the work was not about image and nothing that it was presence. He could be as headstrong as he is mind-wide, and this ban was one reason he remained arguably the least known of major American artists for so long. He eventually relented — noticing how he was becoming better known for the ban itself than for any of his work. Still, few of his shows have proved as difficult to capture with still photography as this current one.

Robert Irwin, Untitled instatllation art

The still image, almost impossible to

As ever, Mr. Irwin jump-starts us into

read in the best of circumstances, fails

“perceiving ourselves perceiving,” the

to capture almost everything going

greatest wonder of all.

on with these pieces, which virtually require movement around and about,

Some of the visitors to the current

back and forth, head-on and then

show could be heard invoking Matis-

from an angle across long expanses

se’s final cutouts. Others Beethoven’s

of attention to activate their mysteries.

last quartets, which was perhaps

Video gets one a little closer (and will

closer, though again not exactly right.

have to do, once the show closes).

Back in high school, three-quarters

Hence our own recourse to such clips

of a century ago, Mr. Irwin used to

in this review, but even there, the play

amass considerable amounts of

of circular bulb-columns, rectangular

pocket change by way of dance

fixture-canisters, reflection and shad-

contests, swinging away to his

ow, and trompe l’oeil backdrops and

beloved Lindy. And to this day he o

sleeves painted the color of shadow,

ften resorts to musical analogues:

continues to confound. Wait, which

bebop, rhythm, syncopation.

is which, and what is going on here?

By Lawrence Weschler

Quantum Leap for Mary Corse

At the age of 72, Mary Corse will have her first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art next month. A group of her pioneering abstract paintings has also recently been acquired by the Dia Art Foundation. Now recognised as sharing affinities with works by artists in the California Light and Space movement, including James Turrell and Robert Irwin, Corse’s works will go on view this weekend (6 May) at Dia:Beacon alongside those of her better-known peers working contemporaneously in the 1960s and 1970s. At her studio and home in the rugged hills of Topanga Canyon, where she moved from downtown Los Angeles in 1970 as a single mother, Corse has been busy completing new monochrome and striped paintings for her debut show with Lisson Gallery in London, also opening in May. her since in 2016. Corse seems both gratified and bemused by the recent flurry of attention.

“For years, I was not accepted

“The vibration of light started to

at all,” Corse says. She recalls a

really interest me,” she says.

group exhibition—including artists

The Whitney retrospective will high-

such as Irwin and Dan Flavin—that

light Corse’s key moments of exper-

featured one of her 20ft paintings

imentation across five decades. “It’s

but “it wasn’t even mentioned that I

tightly focused on when she comes

was in the show in the review”. But

upon a new material or new structure

Corse says she was always more

that helps her play out her ideas of

focused on making her work and

light and how one might find light

raising her sons than on a career.

inside the canvas,” says Kim Conaty,

“Art was about your state of mind,

the exhibition’s curator.

your passion,” she says, noting that it was not until the 1970s that stu-

The show includes her electric light

dents coming out of the California

boxes, begun in 1966—solid white

Institute of the Arts seemed more

Plexiglas encasements of fluores-

professionalised.

cent tubes that emit light from the surfaces. Two years later she made

In 1964, when Corse was only 19,

them completely free and floating

she shifted from making abstract

by removing all wires. While taking

expressionist paintings, influenced

physics classes at the University

by Hans Hofmann and Josef Al-

of Southern California as she was

bers, to experimenting with all-

completing her BFA at Chouinard

white shaped canvases that were

Art Institute, Corse developed

inflected with subtle grooves made

a technique of using Tesla coils

from varying layers of white paint.

embedded in a wall or pedestal

Mary Corse Untitled White Series

to power and ionise the argon gas in the light boxes’ neon tubes. “It wasn’t that I was particularly scientific but I wanted to solve that problem,” she says. While she had reached for objectivity in her early monochromes by sanding out the brushstrokes, the study of quantum physics led to her interest in perception and subjectivity. On a drive home from Malibu in 1968 with the sun angling behind her, she was struck by how it lit up the white dividing line on the highway. She began experimenting with utilitarian glass microspheres used on roadways as a way of harnessing and refracting light on the surface of her paintings. “It’s high-tech sand,” says Corse, who continues to use the material today, applied over white paint in wide vertical bands that divide the canvases in equal segments. From one side, a painting might look like a perfectly flat monochrome. From another angle, the microbeads light up in alternating stripes that dazzle and make visible the swooping brushstrokes. “Mary’s very interested in the ethereal magic of what those microspheres can do on the surface of the painting,” Conaty says. “An inner band that looks alternately like it’s greyish or a brighter white appears and then disappears. For her, the monochrome is something that’s active and alive, and you are part of creating that viewing experience.” At her studio and home in the rugged hills of Topanga Canyon, where she moved from downtown Los Angeles in 1970 as a single mother, Corse has been busy completing new monochrome and striped paintings for her debut show with Lisson Gallery in London, also opening in May.

Light Imitating Art

By Eva Recino

Robert Irwin Untitled Dawn to Dark Larry Bell Bill and Coo

If art asks us to pause and look

The term “Light and Space” is pri-

deeply, Light and Space works

marily traced back to the 1971 ex-

require us to look again and again.

hibition “Transparency, Reflection,

From a different angle, at different

Light, Space,” displayed at the UCLA

times of the day, in the same room

University Art Gallery. It loosely or-

but under different lights. These

ganizes a group of Southern Califor-

pieces suggest we look from afar

nia artists that, starting in the 1960s,

and close up, from both our periph-

worked with the possibilities of light

eral and direct vision. We squint,

and space. Whether through sculp-

trying to decipher the nature of the

ture, installation, performance or

artwork with the information our

other mediums, these artists made

brain gives us — then looking one

use of both artificial and natural light.

more time after realizing maybe

They also often incorporated materi-

that information was false, or just

als like epoxy resin, glass and scrim.

one possibility.

Some of the figures associated with

the movement include Helen Pashgian, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Fred Eversley, James Turrell, Bruce Nauman, Mary Corse, Doug Wheeler, Eric Orr, Maria Nordman, Ron Cooper and more. At its height, the movement often received critique — particularly from the East Coast art world — for its choice of materials. Could art made with materials from the automotive and aerospace industries not be seen as part of those fields? In addition, the movement’s fascination with light became proof to some critics of West Coast artists’ dreamy fascination with the sun, which they got too much of, it seemed. In reality, many of the artists from this movement wanted to capture, investigate and metamorphose this light into something that made for an unexpected artwork.

Larry Bell Untitled Helen Pashgian Untitled

So while East Coast artists focused on minimalism and dealing with actual changing seasons, the artists of the Light and Space movement continued to experiment with new materials and ways of seeing. In “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface,” art historian Robin Clark writes that Light and Space artists “created situations capable of stimulating heightened sensory awareness in the receptive viewer.” This emphasis on the artwork as a situation required that the artists look beyond the aesthetics and requirements that previously defined a piece as an artwork. A situation also implies malleability — elements like changing light, your eyes’ adjustment to visuals and your perception of what an artwork appears to be doing can all influence that experience. Pashgian’s “Light Invisible” (2014), for example, cloaks the viewer in darkness save for luminescent molded-acrylic columns of light. Inside, wooden molds become decipherable, then indecipherable again to the viewer.

The pieces also exist in tandem with their environments — not just as part of (or in spite of) them. In fact, some of the artists resisted the need to have their works reproduced. But anyone paying attention to pop culture would be remiss not to notice the influence of the movement. Take for instance, the LACMA exhibition “James Turrell: A Retrospective,” which included light projections, prints, drawings and installations. One of the exhibition’s works was “Breathing Light,” which required visitors to wear boot covers to walk into a space flooded with color. If you angle your peripheral vision just so, it almost feels like you’re on the brink of falling into a brightly hued black hole. In 2014, rapper Drake visited the exhibition; in 2015, he released the video for “Hotline Bling,” which featured him dancing in boxes suffused in different colors. One of these backlit sets strongly resembles the shape of “Breathing Light,” particularly in its use of a rectangular shape with round edges. And while art lovers might feel irked at the co-opting of Turrell’s work into a music video, with no real reference to the artist, Turrell’s reaction was largely positive. If the artworks of the Light and Space’s movement leave us with one legacy, it’s to look — really look. In our everyday interactions with personal and commercial spaces and our experiences of nature, how does light imbue everything with a certain mood, a certain magic?

By John McDonald

Minimalism, Object, Light, Space

Singapore’s National Gallery is in that honeymoon phase the National Gallery of Australia enjoyed in its early days. Inaugural director, Eugene Tan, has encouraged his curators to set the agenda, resulting in a highly original series of exhibitions exploring the art of south-east Asia and its relationship to the rest of the world. The gallery has also been busy forging alliances with other institutions. Last year, for instance, a retrospective of Malaysian artist, Latiff Mohidin, travelled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Anish Kapoor Abyss

One hopes the curators make the most of their opportunities because in time governments have a tendency to reel in their largesse and start focusing on attendance figures rather than the quality of exhibitions. This happened in Japan when a boom economy began to fizzle in the 1990s, and it has also happened in Australia, with the pernicious “efficiency dividends” that have chipped away at art museum budgets. There’s a palpable sense of excitement about the exhibition, Minimalism.Space. Light.Object., organised by Tan and Russell Storer. It’s a landmark for the gallery, and not just because it’s being co-hosted with the innovative ArtScience Museum, which is worth a visit on any day. This may not be the first time Asian artists have featured in surveys of minimalist art, but never have they been given such prominence. Neither has there been a show that has gone to such lengths to draw connections between minimalism, eastern religion and philosophy, or between art and science. It features 150 works by artists from across the world, including celebrated American minimalists Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Dan Flavin and Robert Morris. There are also pieces by notable Asian artists such as Ai Weiwei, Tatsuo Miyajima, Yayoi Kusama and Lee Ufan. The more enterprising inclusions are by figures such as Sopheap

Pich of Cambodia, David Medalla of the Philippines, Tang Da Wu of Singapore and even Peter Kennedy of Australia. Minimalism is a movement that seems to look fresher as it grows older. When the first examples of socalled minimalist art appeared in the 1960s they were considered the (very) thin end of the avant-garde wedge. Today those same pieces have become museum classics. Over the past 50 years minimalism has taken on a historical dimension even as it continues to exert a powerful shaping influence on our culture. It inspires feelings of nostalgia, but also exists within a perpetual now. Of all modern tendencies, minimalism allows the most room to move, because it was never a movement or school. The Futurists, Expression-

Ai Weiwei Sunflower Seeds

ists and Surrealists formed close-knit groups and issued manifestos. Minimalism didn’t even have a name, let alone a leader such as Marinetti or Breton. It’s often said that Primary Structures, held at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966, was the show that introduced minimal art to the world. Donald Judd, who was included in that show with his plain boxes, disliked the “minimalist” label. As the closest thing minimalism had to a spokesman, Judd preferred the phrase “specific objects” referring to

work that was neither painting nor sculpture, while incorporating elements of both. Like God for the medieval theologians, this art was to be defined largely by what it was not: not naturalistic, not illusionistic, not expressionistic, and so on. Minimal art was neither a window onto the world nor a record of an artist’s emotional outpourings. It was a mute, inexpressive thing. The paradox was that all this dumb inexpressiveness led to mountains of critical writing, most of it mind-numbingly dull. Minimal art presented itself as devoid of those perennial artistic sins of sentimentality and self-indulgence, yet it was also a reaction against the high-flown rhetoric of the tragic and sublime used in connection with the work of Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Reaction is at best an impure motivation. It may be inexpressive, but much minimal art is strikingly elegant. It has also been argued, most notably by the critic, Michael Fried, that the theatricality of minimalism undermined its avowed aesthetic fundamentalism. There’s no doubt this art has the power to stop us in our tracks through the force and simplicity of design. The chutzpah of a Carl Andre floor piece, a Judd box, or a set of fluoro tubes by Dan Flavin have the capacity to dominate a room in any museum. In this exhibition the curators have had a ball thinking of all the other artworks that could be called “minimalist”, and their many and varied sources of inspiration. The show includes programs of music, dance and performance, and a mass of archival material; it extends into forms such as conceptual art and land art. There’s nothing minimal about the quantity or variety of works on display, and the list could have been expanded tenfold.

Olafur Eliasson:

By John McDonald

Elemental Mastery Of Light And Space

Eliasson’s In Real Life exhibition enters its last month at London’s Tate Modern gallery, and offers a feast of sensory exploration. The Icelandic-Dane, whose approach featured in the most recent episode of The Art of Design on Netflix, plays with how we perceive light, space, movement and our surroundings, using a range of natural elements to supplement the viewer’s experience. The artist states his main goal as follows: The Exhibition brings a number of artworks never seen in the United Kindom. Arguably the greatest of the “wow” moments was tucked away in a small dark room — the Big Bang Fountain. A simple but astonishingly effective work in which a small water fountain is illuminated for nano-seconds by a flash of blue light every few seconds. This produces a series of unique still images for the viewer of water frozen in space. The intricate and fragmented water sculptures are juxtaposed by the constant sound of the water.

Elsewhere, Eliasson plays with colours, shadows and reflections to experiment on how we perceive and interact with the world. Another beautiful use of water and light creates a rainbow in his 1993 work Beauty. Its just a punctured hose which shoots a film of fine mist from the ceiling of a dark room, but the shift in the intensity based on the viewer’s perspective makes for an atmospheric experience. Here I am walking behind it nonchalantly: In Uncertain Shadow, Eliasson uses a combination of projectors and the bodies of visitors to create a number of coloured shadows. Akin to the Forest of Flowers in teamLab Borderless Tokyo(check out my article), the guests become an integral part of the artwork. One of the more exciting works revolves around a foggy tunnel, Your Blind Passenger employs fog and lighting to restrict the perception of visitors as they make their way through a long passageway. The ethereal fog shifting from white to a dark yellow. Spooky. The objective here is a portrait of a shifting urban dystopia in which we do not reduce air pollution. Eliasson is telling us that this pea souper may be our future.

Indeed, these works are all different segments of Eliasson’s own perspective on issues of climate change. He hits this home in the last room with portraits of glaciers 20 years apart, one of the more affecting parts of the exhibition: This series of 45 wall-mounted images, taken at the same time of year, reveal the changes which have happened between 1999 and 2019. The impact of melting glaciers on Eliasson is clear in the latter stages of his exhibition, his Glacial Currents watercolours from 2018 uses melted glacial ice to displace pigment on a sheet of paper. This exhibition invites us to consider our own carbon footprint and impact on the planet by different means. Indeed, a great deal of Eliasson’s work hinges on principles of sustainability, visitors are even invited to touch the Moss Wall, made of reindeer moss from Iceland woven into a wire mesh and mounted. He stresses the importance of tactile perception:

The combination of the real and the virtual is used to great effect in How Do We Live Together — where a semicircular arc is united with its reflection to produce one giant ring. Eliasson moves to space with his Science Fiction-infused Your Spiral View, a series of steel plates which produces an otherworldly psychedelic tunnel. An apologetic placard on the side states that they tried to make the tunnel accessible but were not able to. Ending at the beginning, an Inside the Artist’s Studio-esque room which greets the guest on entering the exhibition. Here, Eliasson showcases his models and frames, which give some insight into his study of geometry, colours and movement. Some of these are prototypes for his final work, others are just experiments with geometry. Let’s hope this man has many other ideas lurking in his mental studio.

Light and Space is a loosely affiliated art movement related to op art, minimalism and geometric abstraction originating in Southern California in the 1960s.