Anthony McCall: Dark Rooms, Solid Light

Friday, August 16, 2019–Sunday, November 3, 2019

Anthony McCall (American, born England, 1946). *Split Second (Mirror),* 2018. Installation view, Sean Kelly, New York, 2018. Photograph by Dan Brandica.

1905 Building

Anthony McCall’s installations transcend the familiar boundaries between sculpture, cinema, and drawing to create unforgettable interactive experiences. Anthony McCall: Dark Rooms, Solid Light is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in North America and fills the entirety of the Albright-Knox’s 1905 Building galleries in a survey of the arc of his creative production from the 1970s to today.

Anthony McCall's Doubling Back, 2003 — Anthony McCall (American, born England, 1946). *Doubling Back,* 2003. Installation view, Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland, 2015. Photograph by Stefania Beretta.

Anthony McCall's You and I Horizontal, 2005 — Anthony McCall (American, born England, 1946). *You and I Horizontal,* 2005. Installation view, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, France, 2006. Photograph by Blaise Adilon.

Anthony McCall's Between You and I, 2006 — Anthony McCall (American, born England, 1946). *Between You and I*, 2006. Installation view, Peer/The Round Chapel, London, 2006.

In his immersive solid-light installations, McCall (American, born England, 1946) projects line drawings based on circles and straight lines that expand, contract, and develop over time. Projecting these simple, two-dimensional drawings through a thin mist produces massive, three-dimensional conical enclosures and flat planes that slowly shift in relation to one another in space. In the museum’s Sculpture Court, two vertically oriented side-by-side forms will tower thirty feet from floor to ceiling. In other galleries the forms will be projected horizontally: terminating on a two-sided screen, unfurling in relation to an adjacent wall and floor, or doubling using a mirrored wall.

In addition to five such large-scale installations, which viewers are invited to occupy and to move around and through, the exhibition includes several of McCall’s earliest performance films featuring fugitive materials such as smoke and fire, a slide projection work, and examples of his extensive and diverse works on paper from 1970 to the present. These include notebooks that show the origins and evolution of his ideas, photographs that document and plot performances, and proposals for public projects.

This exhibition is organized by Chief Curator Cathleen Chaffee and Curator of Public Art Aaron Ott.

Please note: This exhibition features very low lighting conditions. For accessibility accommodations, please call 716.270.8249.

Admission to this special exhibition is Pay What You Wish on M&T FIRST FRIDAYS @ THE GALLERY and during our closing weekend, November 2–3, 2019.

Anthony McCall’s work has been included in many groundbreaking exhibitions, including Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964–77, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2001–2); X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2003–4); Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006–7); and The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (2008). In the past year he has mounted solo exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield, England; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.