Let the Light Come In…
important artists using light as their dominant medium in selected key works
It can be argued that all visual artists use light. Otherwise their work wouldn’t be visible, right? Of course, the entire media of film and photography rely on light from source, through process, to finished work. Some artists, though, have explored light and its effects as the work in itself. Here, we’ll take a look at just a few key examples that represent some of the varied approaches to light as art…
Yves Klein began producing Blue Epoch works during the 1950s, using his signature pure ultramarine pigment he called International Klein Blue, presenting the colour as the art. He attempted to capture the experience of colour without tangible substance. Inspired by the infinite blue of a clear sky, he produced large monochrome canvasses that, if viewed up close, the boundaries of the colour-field were outside the observer’s field of vision. He hoped such paintings would then be perceived as pure colour, the notion of surface would disappear, and the viewer would be within colour. He explained his concept as the viewer being inside a corridor of light reflected from the surface and extending beyond them as a continuum of blue.
During the mid-1960s, Conceptual Art became obsessed with separating the meaning from what was…
