ART CITIES: Berlin-Nancy Holt
Nancy Holt is among the most important figures of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. A pioneer of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt redefined the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Over five decades, she questioned how we might understand our place in the world, examining sites, systems, and perception.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Mirrors of Light” presents Nancy Holt’s room-scale installation with the same title, a work from 1973/74 that is crucial to understanding Holt’s notion of perceptual experience. Holt’s practice navigates the complexities of light as artistic medium, physical reality, and aesthetic concept. It is an architectonic structure that channels projected light into a complex spatial experience. Created for the artist’s first solo show in New York City at the LoGiudice Gallery in January 1973, “Holes of Light” invites the viewer to circumvent a bisected room that is activated by shifting intervals of illumination and darkness. Conceived in powers of ten, the 20-foot-wide space is divided lengthwise by a hanging partition wall, which is perforated with a diagonal row of eight 10-inch-diameter circular holes.6 Mounted lights installed on facing walls alternate on and off, shifting light from side to side every thirty seconds. As projected light intersects the dark side of the space, cast 20-inch-diameter ellipses, twice the size of the work’s eponymous circles, form an extended diagonal along the wall. Meanwhile, bright light illuminates the other side, revealing pencil-traced ellipses on the wall, which mark the transitory play of light and shadow. When looking through the partition wall from the lit side, one full circle of light can be seen on the opposite wall, whereas the remaining circles become a graduated sequence of crescents. Realized for the first time since its original installation at Bykert Gallery in 1974, Mirrors of Light I involves a descending diagonal row of ten 9 ½-inch-diameter circular mirrors that are placed along the far wall of a constructed rectangular-shaped room. A spotlight, installed on a side wall, is directed onto the mirrors and casts an opposing diagonal of refracted ellipses around the space. What results is an experience in double perception as the cast circles of light, bent and stretched across the space, are seen partially again in the mirrors. “The world through a circle / Elements real and reflected / Concentrated, encompassed”, begins a concrete poem that Holt wrote in 1970. The circle in her work frames conversely both presence and emptiness, and recalls the earth, sun, moon, and human eye. In pushing the conventions of sculpture and proposing a participatory experience in these early works, the circle is actuated, and Holt’s ideas on the concretization of perception—focus, light, and space—are revealed. Immediately upon realizing “Holes of Light” and “Mirrors of Light I”, Holt began to explore these concepts in the landscape and created “Sun Tunnels” (1973–76), her iconic work in the geographic expanse of Utah’s Great Basin Desert. With “Sun Tunnels”, Holt looked above to capture the purest sources of light. On each summer and winter solstice, four concrete circular tunnels, arranged in an X format, spectacularly frame the sunrise and sunset. Furthermore, during each day, the sun projects through different configurations of holes that correspond to stars in the constellations Capricorn, Columba, Draco, and Perseus, casting circles of light throughout the tunnel. During the evening, in the moon’s light, the holes themselves become circles of light, emulating the constellations in the sky above.
Photo: Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76, Concrete, steel, earth, 280 × 2620 × 1620 cm / 110 1/4 × 1031 1/2 × 637 7/8 inches, © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York Courtesy Sprüth Magers Gallery
Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, Oranienburger Straße 18, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 26/11/2021-5/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://spruethmagers.com
