Perceptual Investigations: Light and Space Works in the Permanent Collection

Perceptual Investigations: Light and Space Works in the Permanent Collection compiled the work of eight artists from the “light and space” movement of the 1960s and 1970s: Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler. With the exception of Flavin, a New York-based artist who pioneered the “light and space” aesthetic in the early 1960s, each of the participants primarily worked in California between the mid-to-late 1960s through the 1970s. For this reason, and because of the close contact between many of these artists during this time, the movement is often characterized as a uniquely West Coast one. Its chief conceptual interest was in the phenomenal experience of art rather than the art object itself, which the artists manipulated through technological and architectural means, including through light installations that appeared to transform physical space itself. Perceptual Investigations contained thirteen such room-sized installations as well as paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photo documentation; it was the first major, long-term public exhibition to highlight this now canonical movement. The exhibition exclusively comprised works from MOCA's collection or on long-term loan to the museum.

Perceptual Investigations: Light and Space Works in the Permanent Collection was organized by Elizabeth A. T. Smith, Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.