Light and Space Movement

About

In Los Angeles in the 1960s artists moved beyond painting and sculpture as objects to work directly on perception. Drawing on the region's bright, clear light and on new plastics, coatings and resins from local aerospace and car-finishing industries, they made works whose edges seem to dissolve.

Larry Bell coated glass cubes with thin metallic films so that they reflect and transmit light at once. John McCracken made lacquered resin planks that lean against the wall in mirror-smooth colour, and Peter Alexander cast translucent resin blocks. Robert Irwin painted discs that appear to float in light, then turned to scrims and subtly altered rooms. James Turrell began projecting light into darkened rooms in 1966 and has spent decades shaping Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona, into a naked-eye observatory. Mary Corse mixes glass microspheres into paint, so her white and black canvases change as the viewer moves.