Document

ANTHONY MCCALL
SOLID LIGHTS AND PERFORMANCE
Fundació Gaspar
14 April – 18 September 2016
Opening: 14 April 2016, 7.30 pm
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First survey in Spain of artist Anthony McCall
‘Solid light’ installation and film works on display at Barcelona’s new contemporary art
space Fundació Gaspar
Premiere of latest work Coming About (2016) created especially for the show
Face to Face III, 2013, Computer, Two video projectors, two haze machines, two double-sided projection screens., One
cycle 30 minutes in two parts.
Fundació Gaspar is pleased to announce the first survey in Spain of the work of British-born, New
York-based artist Anthony McCall. The exhibition, titled Solid Lights and Performance, will present
important film works alongside ‘solid-light’ installations, including the premiere of a new work
Coming About (2016) created especially for the exhibition. Curated by Gloria Moure, the show
explores how McCall’s practice challenges homogeny and the idea of beauty as well as the
concepts of sculpture and performance.
A sequence of film and installation work spanning the artist’s career will be presented in Fundació
Gaspar’s exhibition spaces in a newly renovated early-15th-century gothic palace in Barcelona.
Works on display include Landscape for Fire (1972), a seven-minute film documenting the
performance Landscape for Fire II in which figures clad in white enact a sculptural performance
based on a grid of small fires, creating a synthesis of the grid – a conceptual focus for many artists of
the era – and the natural landscape.
Also featured in the show is Circulation Figures (1972), a room-sized installation of a 1972
performance that took place in London, in which McCall invited a group of people to record their
own presence within a mirrored space blanketed with crumpled newspapers. Hallucinatory video
footage and still images contributed by the original participants were then edited into a looped film
that is projected on to a suspended screen in the exhibition space; mirrors on the wall and
newspapers on the gallery’s floor replicate the original environment.
McCall is best known for his groundbreaking ‘solid-light’ installations, which explore the sculptural
qualities of the light emitted by film projectors, bridging the boundaries between the material and
immaterial, and returning to the essential qualities of film: light and time. These installations invite
the viewer to participate in a truly immersive spectacle and create both a direct sensory experience
and an investigation into spectatorship, space and beauty. As part of the exhibition, Between You
and I (2006), which uses a traditional narrative cinema device for scene transitions called ‘the wipe’
in conjunction with conical, three-dimensional projected light forms, will be shown with new work
Coming About (2016).
Encompassing the full range of expressive media used by McCall, the exhibition highlights the
interactivity of the works as well as the artist’s use of space as a visual and plastic element rather
than a neutral container. The exhibition will be accompanied by a consultation room devoted to
McCall’s works on paper, drawings, schematic diagrams, photographs and projects for open-air
spaces.
About the artist
Anthony McCall (b.1946, England, lives and works in New York) is known for his ‘solid-light’
installations, a series that he began in 1973 with his seminal Line Describing a Cone, in which a
volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in a three-dimensional space.
Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, his work’s historical importance has
been internationally recognized in such exhibitions as Into the Light: the Projected Image in
American Art 1964-77 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2001-2); The Expanded
Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies at the Museum Moderner Kunst,
Vienna, Austria (2003-4); The Expanded Eye at the Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (2006); Beyond
Cinema: the Art of Projection at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2006-7); The Cinema Effect:
Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (2008); The
Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); and On Line at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010-11).
McCall’s work has also been exhibited at, amongst others, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris,
France (2004); Tate Britain, London, England (2004); Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne,
France (2006); Musée de Rochechouart, France (2007); SFMoMA, San Francisco (2007); Serpentine
Gallery, London, England (2007-8); Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy (2009); Moderna Museet, Stockholm,
Sweden (2009); Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2010); Sprueth Magers/Ambika P3,
London, England (2011); the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2011); the
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2012); and the Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina
(2013).
About Fundació Gaspar
Fundació Gaspar is a new private art initiative comprising an exhibition space, bookshop, movie
theatre and café set in an early-15th-century gothic palace in Barcelona. The Foundation was
established in November 2015 by Moishan Gaspar Abdallah, great-grandson of renowned gallerist
Joan Gaspar I Xalabarder, whose historic Barcelona-based gallery Sala Gaspar (1906-1996) staged
numerous exhibitions of Pablo Picasso’s work, including the first Picasso exhibition in Spain after the
civil war, and was a key part of the city’s art scene for 90 years.
Free from institutional or commercial influences and driven by a young team of art lovers, the
exhibition programme at the Foundation aims to be an important reference point for the global art
scene, putting Barcelona at the forefront of the international exhibition circuit, and providing an
exciting and accessible new platform for contemporary art for both local people and international
audiences.
The Foundation also houses the Gaspar Café, located in the central garden of the Palau Cervelló, as
well as a bookshop, which is complemented by a programme of literary exhibitions by different
artists and publishers from around the world, and a small movie theatre specialising in art.
For more information about the programme and activities at the Fundació Gaspar please visit:
http://www.fundaciogaspar.org
About the curator
Gloria Moure lives and works in Barcelona. She is a graduate in Art History from the Faculty of
Philosophy and History of Universitat de Barcelona and has a PhD in Art History from the Faculty of
Fine Arts of Universitat de Barcelona. She began her career as a freelance curator in 1977. In 1984,
she organised the Marcel Duchamp retrospective (Fundació Miró, Barcelona; la Caixa, Madrid, and
Ludwig Museum, Cologne). From 1989 to 1995, she was director of the Fundació Espai Poblenou in
Barcelona, which hosted the first exhibitions in Spain by renowned artists such as Bruce Nauman,
John Cage, Mario Merz, Sigmar Polke and Rodney Graham, among others. As director of the Centro
Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC, Santiago de Compostela), between 1994 and 1998, she
organized major retrospectives of Vito Acconci, Félix González-Torres, Giovanni Anselmo, Medardo
Rosso and Ana Mendieta, among others. From 1993 to 1997, she was a member of the management
advisory committee of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (MNCARS).
She is currently associate editor at Ediciones Polígrafa, where she directs Colección 20/21, a series of
monographs about contemporary artists, including Michael Snow – Sequences (2015), Sigmar Polke
(2014), Marcel Broodthaers: Collected Writings (2013), An Art of Limina. Gary Hill’s Works and
Writings (2009), Dan Graham’s Works and Writings (2009), Jeff Wall (2007) and Gordon MattaClark’s Works and Writings (2006).
Her most recent exhibition project, devoted to Marcel Broodthaers, was shown at the Museo d’Arte
Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo) in spring 2012 and Michael Snow at La Virreina, Barcelona in 2015
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