Exploring ‘the materiality of light’

David Zwirner presents an ambitious suite of work by renowned American artist Doug Wheeler, whose large-scale installations. Built within the gallery space, they explore the materiality of light while emphasizing the viewer’s physical experience of infinite space.

According to critic-curator John Coplans, who organized Wheeler’s first solo in 1968, the artist’s ‘primary aim is to reshape or change the spectator’s perception of the seen world. In short, (his) medium is not light or new materials or technology, but perception.’

The latest exhibit marks the first presentation of an ‘infinity environment’ by the artist in New York. Considered a pioneer of the so-called ‘Light and Space’ movement that flourished in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, Doug Wheeler’s prolific and groundbreaking body of work encompasses drawing, painting, and installations that are characterized by a singular experimentation with the perception and experience of space, volume, and light.

Raised in the high desert of Arizona, he began his career as a painter in the early 1960s while studying at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles. His early white canvases incorporated abstract imagery that created a spatial dynamic and activated the central void of the painting’s field. His practice quickly developed into the environmental aesthetic for which he is presently best known.

In 1965, the artist made a transitional work in which he over-sprayed a canvas with subtle variations of white and installed neon tubes inside the back of the frame. Installed with a white floor, the painting appeared to float on the wall. Wheeler subsequently abandoned canvas altogether with a body of innovative, radiant works known as ‘fabricated light paintings’ in which he applied lacquer to Plexiglas boxes that were illuminated from within by neon tubing.

These ‘paintings’ were followed by his “light encasements,” which consist of large squares of painted vacuum-formed plastic with neon light embedded along the inside edges. Intended to be installed in a pristine white room with coved angles, these works dematerialize and create an immersive and spatially ambiguous environment that absorbs the viewer in the subtle construction of pure space.