Solid Light Works
Anthony McCall

Pioneer Works is pleased to present Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Works, opening on January 12, 2018. This exhibition marks the artist’s first institutional exhibition in New York and first time that his vertical installations will be shown alongside their horizontal variants. 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” at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-2); “The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies” at the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-4); “The Expanded Eye” at the Kunsthaus Zurich (2006); “Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection” at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-7); “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image” at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (2008); and “Dreamlands” at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2017).

Anthony McCall lives and works in New York. His work has 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; and Fundacio Gaspar, Barcelona, among others.

We will celebrate the closing of the exhibition at #SolidLightWorks All Night on March 10 at 12pm to March 11 at 9pm.