b. 1946
b. 1946
Anthony McCall is widely recognized for his ‘solid-light’ installations, hybrid works between sculpture, drawing, and cinema in which projected beams of light inscribe three-dimensional forms into smoke-filled interiors.
Active in the avant-garde cinema communities of London and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, McCall began working in film and performance before developing his ‘solid-light’ installations, beginning with Light Describing A Cone, 1973. In this work, audiences moved freely within the space as a three-dimensional cone of light slowly emerged from a projector. P. Adams Sitney, in his landmark history of avant-garde cinema, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, described McCall’s installations of the 1970s as, “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.” Since the 1990s, technological advancements have allowed McCall to continue to develop these installations, to involve multiple projectors inscribing increasingly complex and interwoven forms. Recent solid-light works such as Split Second consist of multiple, interpenetrating solid-light forms creating a dynamic, activated space. McCall’s work makes visible the immaterial qualities of cinema, including light, space, and duration. His installations liberate the viewer to engage with their materials through both the body and the eye.
The historical importance of McCall’s work’s has been internationally recognized in such exhibitions as Dark Rooms, Solid Light, at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2019), Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works, at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York (2018); Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); On Line at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010-11), The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (2008); and The Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008).
McCall’s work has also been exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Tate Britain, London, England; Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France; Musée de Rochechouart, France; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Serpentine Gallery, London, England; Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany; the Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina; LOK | Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland; Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, Lugano, Switzerland; and the Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England, amongst others. His [MOU3] [AL4] work is represented in numerous collections, including, Tate, London, England; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC.
Anthony McCall currently lives and works in New York.
For more information, please visit www.anthonymccall.com.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme Board Advisor and former Senior BBC Series Producer interviews Artist, Anthony McCall.
Installation video of Anthony McCall: Split Second at Sean Kelly, New York, December 14, 2018 - January 26, 2019, Video: Sean Mattison, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York © Anthony McCall
VernissageTV: Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works / Pioneer Works, New York, March 6, 2018
Freunde der Nationalgalerie: Anthony McCall, Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture. August 17, 2016.
Arts Hub: Interview with Anthony McCall, December 5, 2016
Blouin ArtInfo: Anthony McCall's Notebooks & Duration Drawings, Jul. 9, 2015
TateShots: Anthony McCall – Line Describing a Cone, Aug. 13, 2008
The Eye Film Museum will present Anthony McCall: Solid Light Films and Other Works (1971-2014) from September 28 to November 30, 2014, his first solo exhibition in the Netherlands.
For its inaugural event of the 2014 season, Basilica Hudson will present ECLIPSE, a collaboration between choreographer Jonah Bokaer and visual artist Anthony McCall. ECLIPSE is a multidisciplinary performance that integrates choreography, light, visual design, and an audio-visual time score to arrive at altered ways of viewing a performance.
Traveling Wave, an installation by Anthony McCall, has recently opened at Yale School of Art’s 32 Edgewood Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
Rarely seen early photographs and works on paper from Anthony McCall's Four Figures series will be included in the group exhibition Lunch with Olympia.
The Faena Arts Center will present the work of Anthony McCall for the first time in Argentina.
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) will present You and I, Horizontal (II), the first solo museum exhibition of work by Anthony McCall in the Midwest.
On Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 2pm Anthony McCall will deliver a talk at Tate Liverpool offering insight into his artistic practice. This event coincides with the opening of the exhibition Tracing the Century: Drawing as a Catalyst for Change, which will be at Tate Liverpool from November 16, 2012 to January 20, 2013. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to experience Anthony McCall’s seminal solid-light film Line Describing a Cone, 1973, which is part of the Tate collection.
BAM will host the world premiere of ECLIPSE, the breathtaking collaboration between choreographer Jonah Bokaer and artist Anthony McCall exploring total motion through uniting Boaker's choreography with an installation by McCall constructed of shifting avenues of light and spatialized, sonic images. ECLIPSE will be the inaugural performance in BAM's Fishman Space, a performance venue which optimally suited for the piece as its four-sided seating configuration creates an intimate, immersive experience.
Column will be a new public sculpture by Anthony McCall, commissioned by Arts Council England. It will run for one year.
The New Art Trust (NAT) has announced the promised gift of a cohesive body of early work by Anthony McCall, consisting of six Solid Light Films and related materials from the 1970s, by Pamela and Richard Kramlich. Two additional works related to the seminal series have also been donated to the Trust by the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery. All works will be made available for presentation by the NAT’s three consortium members, who are the focus of its programs and resources, and include: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); and the Tate, United Kingdom, which will present a selection of these works in Anthony McCall: The Complete Cone Films on July 22, 2012, in the new Tanks at Tate Modern, London.
Anthony McCall will be included in a group exhibition at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial titled Electric Nights.
A special screening of the film and digital remake of Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone will be shown simultaneously at Tate Modern London.
Anthony McCall's seminal work Line Describing Cone, 1973 is included in the group exhibition Seeing Now: Photography since 1960 at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland.