Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

November 23, 2021–March 20, 2022 
 
Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022) offered museumgoers the opportunity to experience a distinctly West Coast style of art on the East Coast, presenting work by artists affiliated with the Light and Space movement and related “finish fetish” works with highly polished surfaces. The exhibition, which opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art on November 23, 2021, is one of the most comprehensive ever assembled of these artists and highlighted works that explore perceptual phenomena via interactions with light and space. Drawn from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Light, Space, Surface featured a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to immersive environments. 
 
Inspired in part by the car and surf cultures that dominated Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s—as well as a multitude of other sources—many Los Angeles-based artists pioneered new technologies and utilized the revolutionary materials developed in the region’s growing aerospace industry, including sheet acrylic, fiberglass, and polyester resin, to produce the reduced, crisp, and clean forms essential to their works. While there was no single defining aesthetic among this varied and loose-knit group, these artists, from Mary Corse and John McCracken to Fred Eversley and James Turrell, shared a common interest in investigating how we understand form, volume, presence, and absence through light, whether seen directly or refracted, reflected, and/or viewed through other materials. 
 
“Transforming the viewer from passive observer to active participant, the reflective surfaces, glossy finishes, and shimmering colors of these works demand close examination and multisensory engagement. Placing emphasis on the experience of the object rather than the object itself, these artists ask us to consider not what we see, but how we see.” 
—Allison Kemmerer, the interim director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Mead Curator of Photography, and senior curator of contemporary art 
 
Learn more at the Addison Gallery of American Art.