Light Art

About

Light art uses light itself as the material: electric bulbs, neon and fluorescent tubes, LEDs, projectors and daylight shaped by architecture. Thomas Wilfred played shifting coloured light on his Clavilux instrument in the 1920s, calling the art Lumia, and in 1951 Lucio Fontana looped a neon arabesque above a staircase in Milan.

The 1960s made light a central medium. Dan Flavin fixed a single fluorescent tube diagonally on a wall in the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (1963) and later flooded corridors with coloured glow. Bruce Nauman and Keith Sonnier bent neon into words and loops. Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone (1973) turned a projector beam in a hazy room into an apparently solid form, and James Turrell shapes perception with pure fields of light, including skyspaces open to the sky. Jenny Holzer runs texts across LED signs. Such works change as the eye adjusts.