Anthony McCall

Luciana Brito Galeria presents the first solo exhibition in Brazil of works by Anthony McCall. Conceived as a retrospective, this exhibition of the artist’s earlier and more recent works is accompanied by a bilingual (Portuguese/English) catalogue featuring more than one hundred images and excerpts from several essays and interviews with Anthony McCall from the last decade – all unpublished in Portuguese – as well as an essay by exhibition curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti.

The groundbreaking film Line Describing a Cone (1973), originally shot in 16mm and very recently recreated digitally by McCall (Line Describing a Cone 2.0, 2010) will be shown in both its versions, alongside other celebrated works such asLandscape for Fire (16 mm film, 1972), Five Minute Drawing(1974/2007), and one of the artist’s most recent solid-light films titled Meeting You Halfway (II) (2010). The exhibition will also include a large series of schemes and scores for performances, drawings and prints.

Widely known for his film-based installations that emphasize the sculpturalqualityoflight in dark environments, Anthony McCall gained public recognition in the early 1970s, conceiving and producing large-scale performances based on the carefully planned lighting of small fires in rural areas, often involving a large number of participants over long periods of time (the Fire Cycle series). In 1973, after moving from London to New York, Anthony McCall began the series of “solid-light films”, which rank among the most radical and original approaches to film-making in the way they blur the boundaries between different media, as for example cinema, sculpture, installation, relational art, etc. In 2003, following a period of about two decades in which he refrained from producing art, the artist began a new series of solid-light films, taking advantage of digital technology to create extremely complex patterns that were previously unconceivable. At present, Anthony McCal is working on a series of public commissions (in the UK, New Zealand and USA) to be dedicated by 2012.

Anthony McCall took part in countless solo and group exhibitions in major museums and cultural institutions in Europe and the USA, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Tate Modern (London, UK), Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon, Portugal), Museu d´Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Whitney Biennial (New York, USA), Documenta (Kassel, Germany), among many others. His works integrate major collections worldwide, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, Maryland), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Museum of Modern Art (MoMa - New York, USA), Tate (London, England), among others. Anthony McCall received the Special Exhibition 2006 Award by the International Association of Art Critics, in Germany.