Between You and I, 2006

Anthony McCall's Between You and I is on display at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, located 18 km south of Hildesheim. Schloss Derneburg was the home and studio of the artist Georg Baselitz for approximately thirty years before it was transformed into one of the largest privately owned public museums for contemporary art in Europe, and a home of the Hall Art Foundation. The Hall Art Foundation was founded in 2007 and makes available postwar and contemporary art works from its own collection and that of its founders, Andrew and Christine Hall, for the enjoyment and education of the public.

In Between You and I, a monumental pair of translucent, conical forms of white light stand side-by-side. The ceiling-mounted projectors throw a tracery of line-drawings down onto the carpeted floor of a darkened Silo barn located on the grounds of the Schloss. A delicate mist in the room reveals these lines as planes and volumes in a continuously shifting state of exchange with one another.

McCall refers to this paradoxical state as "solid light": it appears to be opaque and solid, but it is, in fact, intangible. As is common in McCall's practice, the resulting volumetric volumes are best appreciated whilst visitors themselves occupy and move in or around the bodies of light, actions which will be rewarded by the discovery of new, unexpected chambers and pockets of space, which shift and change over time.

Biography

Anthony McCall (b. 1946) is a British-born, New York-based artist. He studied graphic design and photography, history of art and philosophy at Ravensbourne College of Art in London. Since the early 1970s, McCall has lived in New York, where he made his first forays into experimental film and performance as well as initiating his Solid Light Works, a unique series of light installations. In August 1973, McCall became renowned for his seminal Line Describing a Cone, a thirty-minute-long 16mm film in which a line on the screen gradually traces a circle. Yet in a darkened mist-filled room, this simple two-dimensional line is transformed into a three-dimensional, space-occupying sculptural object. With this work, the artist transcended the established boundaries of film and sculpture, inspiring other artists, including, amongst others, Richard Serra and Gordon Matta-Clark. After a twenty-year-long hiatus in the 1980s and 1990s, McCall resumed the series, creating an entirely new body of work that seamlessly combined cinema, sculpture, drawing, performance and installation.  Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hangar Bicocca in Milan, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Tate Gallery in London, and many other museums throughout the world.