Keith Sonnier, Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent (1970), via Art Observed

Celebrating the forty year history of its residency at the school building in Long Island City, MoMA PS1 has launched an impressively expansive exhibition reflecting on the history and continued vitality of the alternative art spaces movement in both its impact on the history of 20th Century art, as well as its resonance in the field today.  Culling together a diversely focused but attentively arranged group of artists, FORTY presents a series of studies on the voices of the 1970’s New York art community, and its broader connections to the changing face of contemporary art during the era. (more…)

Doug Wheeler, Untitled (1969/2014), via David Zwirner © 2016 Doug Wheeler

The work of Doug Wheeler is an exercise in embodiment and space, perhaps more so than many of his Light and Space compatriots.  Rather than merely exploring the sensations of seeing and perceiving space, Wheeler pushes beyond this sense of expanded optics and its cognitive effects, often exploring how this sense of space is reflected onto broader sensations of the body.  Encasements, the third solo exhibition by Wheeler in collaboration with David Zwirner, continues this work, showing a body of smaller-scale works that work in a strikingly harmonious series of interactions throughout the gallery. (more…)

Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012). All images via David Zwirner.

At age 72, Doug Wheeler opens his first solo show in New York City at David Zwirner. A single site-specific installation, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 challenges the finite perceptions of interior space, creating what some have called a visual “vacuum tube” in the gallery’s massive exhibition space.  Long regarded for his contributions to the “Light and Space” movement of the 1970s, the American artist works to remove the visual cues of a space, focusing instead on the materiality of light and the human perception thereof. Longing back to the days of his childhood, flying over the western desert with his father, Wheeler said in a recent interview with the New York Times, “When I was growing up, the sky was everything to me.”

Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012)

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