Light as Subject
Works in which light itself, whether painted, captured or switched on, is the true subject or material.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Light as Subject are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Light can be what a work shows or what it is made of. Abbot Suger rebuilt the choir of Saint-Denis near Paris in the 1140s so that stained glass would flood it with coloured, divine light. Georges de La Tour's Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (c. 1640) meditates by candlelight over a skull, and Joseph Wright of Derby lit the rapt faces in A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (c. 1766) with a hidden lamp in place of the sun.
Yoshida Hiroshi printed the same sailing boats at six times of day in 1921. From the 1960s light itself became a medium. Dan Flavin arranged fluorescent tubes, Carlos Cruz-Diez flooded rooms with pure coloured light in Chromosaturation, and James Turrell has spent decades shaping Roden Crater in Arizona into an observatory of light. Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project (2003) hung an artificial sun in a London hall.
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