Light & Space

Step into a world of light, colour, and gigantic installations in Light & Space, when CC for the first time in Europe brings together a rich array of art-world luminaries in an expansive 5,000 m2 exhibition on the American art movement known as Light and Space.

Explore historical artworks by James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, Helen Pashgian, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Bruce Nauman, Mary Corse, and many others – alongside works by contemporary European artists inspired by the pioneering art movement, among them Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, and Jeppe Hein.

The singular exhibition, CC’s biggest to date, sprawls across all five exhibition halls and ends in CC studio’s interactive laboratory where you can experiment with light, colour, and space and build with transparent LEGO and light.

In B&W’s old gigantic halls you will meet magnificent artworks, which vary in scale and materials and experiment with the art experience: From Robert Irwin’s over 16-metre-wide and 8-metre-tall work illuminated by 115 fluorescent tubes to Anish Kapoor’s renowned light-absorbing void. From Connie Zehr’s delicately sculptural landscape of sand mounds arranged across the floor to Doug Wheeler’s dome-shaped installation with a diameter of more than 20 metres erasing spatial boundaries into a luminous horizon. From Larry Bell’s human-sized glass cubes inspired by the fog rolling in over Venice Beach to James Turrell’s immersive Aftershock – one of his celebrated Ganzfeld works, made specifically for the exhibition at CC.

Light & Space features both historical and new works from the American light and installation art movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1960s. At the time, a number of young artists were experimenting with making art out of light and new materials inspired by Los Angeles’ mix of sun, surf culture, Hollywood glamour, spirituality, and endless traffic jams.
The artists worked separately but are collectively known as the Light and Space movement, and several of them have become some of the most coveted in the world.

The new materials that became available after WW2 triggered explorations of space and light. In turn, the Light and Space artists in various ways contributed to a radical shift in art, away from a focus on object and meaning to an awareness of how art and space are experienced with the body.

In their search for new artistic opportunities and expressions, the artists entered collaborations with the growing space industry and researchers from the University of California, where collaborative experiments with light, space, and materials were made.
Fibreglass, epoxy, and coated glass made it possible to create sleek, reflective surfaces, paving the way for a new style of art that expanded the traditional categories of painting and sculpture, changing how we experience art.

The innovations and experiments that the Light and Space artists introduced in the second half of the 20th century have inspired many of today’s leading architects and artists. The movement’s members blazed a trail for European artists like Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, AVPD, Ann Veronika Janssens, Jeppe Hein, and many others, who are also featured in the exhibition.

Light & Space highlights the connections between art from the American West Coast and contemporary European art across time and place. The exhibition offers fresh perspectives on the often-overlooked affinities between the Light and Space movement and today’s phenomenologically oriented European contemporary art.