Exceptional Works: Doug Wheeler

“I want the spectator to stand in the middle of the room and look at the painting and feel that if you walk into it, you’ll be in another world.”

—Doug Wheeler

Doug Wheeler

Untitled, 1967

Sprayed lacquer on acrylic, magnetic transformer, and daylight neon

88 5/8 x 83 5/8 x 6 7/8 inches (225.1 x 212.4 x 17.5 cm)

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A pioneer of the so-called Light and Space movement that flourished in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, the American artist Doug Wheeler (b. 1939) is known for his innovative constructions and installations that engage with the experience of light, space, and sound.

Presented at Wheeler’s first solo exhibition in 1968, Untitled (1967) is a rare example of the artist’s fabricated light paintings. Made between 1965 and 1967, this small yet significant body of work marks both Wheeler’s departure from traditional painting and his commitment to using light as his principal medium.

Doug Wheeler with RM 669, 2623 Main Street studio, Ocean Park, Santa Monica, c. 1972

Wheeler’s work has its origins in the artist’s early life. Raised in Globe, Arizona, Wheeler would accompany his father, a doctor and pilot, who cared for patients on the remote ranches and reservations throughout north-central Arizona via airplane. Wheeler was often allowed to fly his father’s planes—early experiences that became a source of creativity.

These experiences of the sky and of boundless expanse made a lifelong impression on the artist, immersing him in a celestial territory from which he learned about the quality of light and its effects.

Doug Wheeler with Bellanca Cruisemaster and his German shepherd Zero, c. 1969

“I used to lie down on my back when I was in Arizona and you could see the zillions of stars and the vault … up there. I’d have to hold on to [bunch grass or] something because I was afraid that I would float right up into that and gravity would not hold me.… I was conscious of the planet in the sense of light.”

—Doug Wheeler

Doug Wheeler, Untitled (Canvas Light), 1965. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann

Wheeler began his career as a painter, studying at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles in the early 1960s.

In 1965, he experimented with paintings in which a canvas was sprayed with subtle variations of white and neon tubes were installed inside the back of the work, which had Lucite edges. Installed with a white floor, these neon and canvas paintings, an example of which includes Untitled (Canvas Light) (1965) in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, cast a radiant glow and appeared to float on the wall. Wheeler soon abandoned canvas altogether and began working with neon and acrylic in the fabricated light paintings.

This period marks the artist’s turn to light itself as a medium to articulate space.

Doug Wheeler, Untitled, c. 1965. Collection of Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

“The sensation [Wheeler] is looking for is a perimetral halo within the luminous surface, very close to the perception of a total solar eclipse.… All his attention is focused on the intensity and unity, the density and consistency of the light, which lies beneath. The radiant entity that emerges from the spray-painted acrylic sheet seems almost like the birth of a new phenomenal event.”

— Germano Celant

Installation view, Doug Wheeler, Pasadena Art Museum, California, 1968

In order to test different types of neon, spectral effects, and ways of allowing the light to play across the field and edges, Wheeler executed a series of two small fabricated light paintings.

The artist subsequently made two in a large-scale format—including Untitled (1967)—both of which were shown in his first solo exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1968.

John Coplans, “Doug Wheeler: Light Paintings,” Artforum, September 1968

“Wheeler transforms light and whiteness until it loses its innate hardness of effect and in his hands it becomes intangible, yet mysteriously evocative of the human presence.”

—John Coplans, Artforum

Installation view, Doug Wheeler, Untitled, 1967

“I made a field where the light could work like the pigment was working.… The frame of light in the fabricated pieces was basically to define that field, where you see this kind of void in the center, and the center has a kind of activity but it’s very minimal, it’s subtle.… The light piece had its own world, it was its own illumination.”

—Doug Wheeler

Doug Wheeler, a monograph published in 2019 by David Zwirner Books

A monograph published in 2019 by David Zwirner Books, Doug Wheeler is the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s career to date. The publication features new scholarship by art historian Germano Celant and extensive illustrations of Wheeler’s most significant works from the early 1960s to the present, as well as never-before-published images, drawings, and other archival material.

In this episode of Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast , the artists Doug Wheeler and Vija Celmins revisit their years in Venice Beach, California, in the late 1960s, a scene populated with figures like Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Irwin, and Maria Nordman. Wheeler and Celmins—old friends and visionaries of their mediums—gossip, rehash, map, and even correct this vital period of art history while tackling a central question along the way: how to impress your sensibility upon the world through your work.

Doug Wheeler recording Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast, 2020

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