Artist: Anthony McCall

Sean Kelly presents Solid Light, 1973, 2020, 2026, Anthony McCall's seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together three significant works spanning over fifty years of the artist's career, the exhibition traces the remarkable evolution of McCall's pioneering solid light works, from his groundbreaking Line Describing a Cone, 1973 to Skylight, 2020 and the debut of his newest work Swarm, 2026. The exhibition reveals the sustained rigor with which McCall has redefined the possibilities of sculpture, drawing, cinema, and sound, to create groundbreaking immersive environments.

Anthony McCall is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists working with light and moving image. Emerging from the avant-garde film communities in London and New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he rejected the conventions of narrative cinema in favor of an investigation into the essential properties of film itself. The resulting "solid-light" installations transformed projected light into sculptural form, inviting viewers to move through and inhabit the work. Technological advancements since the 1990s have enabled McCall to develop increasingly complex installations, yet his practice remains rooted in the same fundamental exploration of perception, time, and the relationship between body and space.

The exhibition features the gallery’s first presentation of McCall’s iconic work Line Describing a Cone, which is represented in numerous important museum collections. Over the course of thirty minutes, a single projected line slowly traces the outline of a circle, forming a luminous cone that gradually materializes within a haze-filled room. Rather than watching a projected image on a screen, viewers enter the beam itself, walking through, around, and inside a volume of light that appears at once immaterial and tangible. Dissolving the boundaries between film, sculpture, performance, and conceptual art, Line Describing a Cone reimagined the cinematic experience as a shared spatial encounter and remains one of the defining works of twentieth-century installation art.

The exhibition also features Skylight, 2020, a vertical solid-light installation that extends McCall's investigation of perception through an intricate dialogue between light and sound. Projected from above onto a plinth, the work produces a slowly shifting cone of light that can be experienced from every angle. Accompanied by an original score by acclaimed composer David Grubbs, Skylight evokes the gradual approach and recession of an imagined thunderstorm through distant rumbles, flashes of lightning, and the steady rhythm of falling rain. The work belongs to a series of works in which McCall explores the dynamic relationship between visual form, silence, and sound.

Swarm, 2026, McCall's most recent work, premieres in the exhibition, draws on the rising significance of drones as an increasing presence in daily life. The installation is composed of two conical-light volumes that rotate slowly in opposite directions, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, over a duration of fifteen minutes. Accompanying the mesmerizing visuals is a rich soundscape that gradually intensifies as a powerful auditory experience. The dramatic, progressive soundtrack serves as a continuation of the ongoing collaboration between McCall and Grubbs.

McCall has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at leading institutions worldwide, including Tate Modern, London; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Fubon Art Museum, Taipei; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Futura, Seoul; Serpentine Gallery, London; the Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. His work is held in the permanent collections of major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and numerous other public collections internationally.