the infinite (void)
Doug Wheeler's latest show at David Zwirner presents new work, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012), an "infinity environment" which plays on the materiality of light to create a physical experience of infinite space, something the artist has explored throughout his career.
The Wheeler piece is visually the antithesis of the Miroslaw Balka installation at the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2009, in that Balka played on the absence of light by using a heavy, industrial material - steel - in an industrial-sized space (ex-industry), to construct a dark cavern - the opposite of the white cube.
The two works depict "white" and "black" space, both acting as notions of the "void". Walking inside Balka's installation was not unlike how someone described Wheeler's show in New York, in that once inside the space, you didn't know where it started or ended - unless of course you looked towards the natural light source - behind you most probably. (Echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice here, not to mention the Cave Analogy).
The binary nature of the two exhibits - Wheeler's pure, white space, and Balka's black abyss, somehow recalls Kasimir Malevich's Suprematism Manifesto, in which he declared:
The binary nature of the two exhibits - Wheeler's pure, white space, and Balka's black abyss, somehow recalls Kasimir Malevich's Suprematism Manifesto, in which he declared:
Images: 1. Courtesy of David Zwirner. 2. David Levene courtesy of "How it is: Miroslaw Balka, Unilever Series" by Laura Cumming, The Observer, Sunday 18 October 2009 3. Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913 and White on White, 1918, with text from the Suprematism Manifesto, 1926. S.Bailey
RSS Feed