Anthony McCall. Solid Light Works

About

 Requiring over thirty feet of clearance from floor to ceiling, very few New York venues can accommodate these six-colossal works. The epic vertical and horizontal installations will fill Pioneer Works’ monumental main hall, which will be completely blacked out and immersed in haze.

A seminal figure of Expanded Cinema, McCall is well known for his “solid-light works.” It was a series he began in 1973 with the 16mm film Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of a beam of projected light slowly evolves in real, three-dimensional space. McCall regards these works as occupying a place somewhere between sculpture, cinema, and drawing: sculpture because the projected volumes must be occupied and explored by a moving spectator; cinema because these large-scale objects are not static, but structured to progressively shift and change over time; and drawing, because the genesis of each installation is a two-dimensional line-drawing.

The historical importance of McCall’s work has been recognized in such exhibitions as “Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-77,” Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-2); “The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies,” Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-4); “The Expanded Eye,” Kunsthaus Zurich (2006); “Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection,” Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-7); “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image,” and Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008); and “Dreamlands”, Whitney Museum of American Art (2017).

His work has also been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA New York; SFMoMA; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Serpentine Gallery, London; Tate Modern, London; EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Lugano Arte e Cultura; Fundacio Gaspar, Barcelona, amongst others.

Anthony McCall lives and works in New York.