Our own Jaffer Kolb in The Architect’s Journal:
As you walk into British artist Anthony McCall’s show at the Serpentine, the first thing you see is a translucent white perspex screen, smaller than a piece of A4 paper, showing a rotating series of 81 slides of abstract light patterns and shapes. It’s a bit Peter Kubelka, a bit Stan Brakhage, and an unrepresentatively humble first impression of the exhibition. But that’s much of the charm of the artist’s eponymous show: it’s brilliantly curated, leading you into fantastically dramatic blacked-out spaces by way of comparatively low-key process drawings and crude examples of McCall’s work. Numerous schematic diagrams and studies hanging around the slide plinth in the front room show the sculptor at his most architectural. The drawings are precisely done; volumetric light diagrams are suspended in simply ruled boxes; matrices of dots determine the locations for his Fire Cycle series of the early 1970s (where he lit fires in various patterns in the Scottish countryside). It’s a pleasant reminder that process work can be both beautiful and informative – these drawings don’t have that nasty feeling of affectation.
More here.
