'Creating a Desert Essence With Light and Space' by Andy Battaglia
2016
For Doug Wheeler, a longtime sculptor of light and space, making art is a way of summoning old memories of the wide desert sky.
“As a kid, I would lie down and have to grab onto something,” he said of the vastness he grew up with in the American Southwest. “I was afraid gravity would fail and I would fall into it.”
The sublime skies of his youth, Mr. Wheeler said, provided inspiration for atmospheric art that has strived for decades to provide the same sensation, one that can be experienced in an exhibition opening Saturday at David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea.
The exhibit, the 76-year-old artist’s third solo show in New York after a welcome return from obscurity in 2012, features five historical works that transform light and space into highly experiential art. Hung on a wall in meticulously calibrated conditions in specially designed rooms, each piece features neon tubes in translucent plastic encasements that seem to float and glow in different dimensions.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.