For more than 50 years, the Danish-Swedish artist Gun Gordillo has used light as a source and material for her art, establishing herself internationally as a pioneer of light art.

A trip to Egypt in 1974 marked the true beginning of Gordillo’s exploration of the properties of light. Mesmerised by a public space filled with big, glowing script – an abstract visual language in the heart of Cairo – she brought her experiences back to her studio.

Neon light quickly became the central element of Gordillo’s works in counterpoint and interplay with a wide range of sculptural materials. The artist combines the weightless, delicate quality of neon light with robust materials like lead, stone and metal, alongside transparent, reflective elements like mirrors and plexiglass that create space. With a playful approach, she boldly brings together materials to create distinctive shapes and spatialities, generating a dialogue between lightness and weight. Adding an extra dimension to her works, neon light produces a unique sense of movement that heightens tensions and contrasts of absence and presence, invisibility and clarity, heft and delicacy. To Gordillo, neon light possesses its own uniquely concentrated energy that is simultaneously contained and alive, fleeting, mutable and impossible to capture

CC is displaying three works on loan from the artist’s collection, embodying her lifelong work with neon light. In the installation Porta Blanca (2000), neon light falls from above like scribbled lines on paper, while reflections from transparent plexiglass panels open the title’s white portal into another world beyond the physical exhibition space. Stratos (2010) hovers on the wall like an atmospheric vortex, its painted acrylic panel evoking a densely foggy, infinite space. Roxi (2023), a painterly neon tube weaving smoothly around hard steel, is impish and insistent like a punctuation mark in the line of exhibited works.

Gordillo’s art often presents an encounter with the unexpected, involving anything from the placement and reflections of neon light to the dimensions and combinations of materials. There is a poetic musicality to her work, a singular sense of weightlessness and eternal motion, as she transforms light into something magical in ever-changing dialogue with its surroundings.

Gun Gordillo, Gun Gordillo (b. 1945, Lund, Sweden) studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1969 to 1975, where she later served as professor. She has divided her life and career between Denmark, Sweden and France, spending 14 years in Paris with her husband, the artist Freddy Fraek. Both were long affiliated with the legendary Galerie Denise René, known for championing kinetic and constructivist art. Today, Gordillo is represented by 2112, Copenhagen.