ART CITIES:London-Spencer Finch

Spencer Finch is known for his exploration of light and color across a range of mediums, using the effects of natural lighting and precise settings to create environments that immerse the viewer in a cerebral beauty, with both a scientific approach to gathering data and a true poetic sensibility, Spencer’s Finch installations, sculptures and works on paper filter perception through the lens of nature, history, literature and personal experience.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lisson Gallery Archive

In his new exhibition at Lisson Gallery, through a new installation, light-boxes, watercolours and pastels, Spencer Finch analyses the points at which conventional vision vanishes to become something else and examines the subjective lens of each individual through discrete bodies of work. Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poetry and by the movement of bees, Finch has attempted to track and map the complex paths taken in the delivery and exchange of pollen. Proceeding through careful observation, measurement and precision, Finch’s art translates the complexities of the natural world into arrangements of colur and light that are simultaneously abstract and representational, technically devised yet auratic in their effect. In the impossibility of their undertaking, his endeavours are frequently Sisyphean, matching a Herculean task with a touch that is deliberately slight and human, with the ultimate aim of igniting wonder. “To make an honest picture, you have to fail and fail repeatedly, because you can never capture how something actually looks”, said Spencer Finch. His subjects are the ineffable and evanescent, the human condition of remembering or the quality of light at a given moment, lending to a full comprehension of nature in spite of man’s technological advancement.

Info: Lisson Gallery, 27 Bell Street, London, Duration: 1/4-7/5/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.lissongallery.com