Preview on the occasion of Art Cologne:
26 April 11am-6pm, 27 April 11am-8pm, 28 April 11am-6pm
Opening reception: Saturday, 29 April, 4pm.
The artists will be present.
Introduction: Georg Imdahl, Academy of Fine Arts Muenster; Thomas Zander
Opening hours: Tue-Fri 11-6, Sat 12-6 and by appointment
On the Second Floor, Anthony McCall’s sound installation, created in 1972, is on view. Since the 1970s, McCall’s installations have combined an unbroken conceptual rigour and an unforgettable viewing experience. The works of the New York based artist (born 1946 in St. Paul’s Cray, England) inhabit a space between graphic art, film, performance, and mobile sculpture, while exploring and continually redefining the relation between viewer and work. In Traveling Wave a dense cloud of white noise is repeatedly launched down an empty gallery space and becomes a rolling, invisible sculpture. The noise quite literally travels through the space in five hemispherical speakers sitting on the floor, which are equally spaced and arranged in a single line longitudinally down the room. Wherever the observer stands, the movement of the wave can be clearly described in relation to the body and the wave hits with a powerful, minimalist simplicity. Initially developed at the time of the Expanded Cinema movement, McCall’s installations focus on the constitutive elements of cinema: light and time. The first and prototypical work of his own genre of solid light films, is the work Line Describing a Cone (1973), in which a white line on a black ground gradually completes a full circle. Projected into a room filled with thin haze, this line describes the volumetric form of a cone and thus a spatial installation is created by light. The viewers enter the room looking straight into the projector and hearing the mechanical noise of the apparatus while moving freely through the sculpture. In an exceptionally consistent way, McCall’s work reflects the parameters of space, time, and movement through different media. After his rediscovery of sound for his work, the artist created a digital installation of Traveling Wave in 2013, which he first exhibited at Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam the following year. Like McCall’s light works, this solid sound installation elicits both a physical and a metaphysical experience in the viewer. The viewer can enter the installation as an immersive experience outside their everyday life. On the other hand, the work reflects the human condition in the information age: immersed in a stream of white noise.
Anthony McCall’s film- and light installations have become a pillar of the international art scene and were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Britain in London and Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, among other renowned institutions. From 27 to 30 April, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin shows Line Describing a Cone. The artist’s oeuvre is accompanied by numerous publications.
Zander Galerie
Schönhauser Straße 8
50968 Cologne
Germany
Zander Galerie
6 Rue Jacob
75006 Paris
France