Brigitte Kowanz, Light Steps, 1990

1990

Medium

Black light tubes

Edition

Ex. 1/3

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-155760

With "Light Steps" (1990) Brigitte Kowanz creates a minimalistic, space-related installation consisting of eleven black light tubes arranged step-like to form a freely hanging staircase. Since the early 1980s, the artist has been exploring the connection of light in space, investigating the transitions between reality and virtuality. Black light blurs the contours in space and highlights other aspects of perception that remain hidden in day light. Through the black light, the staircase begins to float, the materiality of the neon tubes recedes into the background in favor of an immaterial perception of light and the expansion of light waves comes into focus. "Light is energetic and infinitely complex. It is omnipresent and yet intangible. Light makes everything visible, yet remains transparent itself. It has suction power and is inseparable from space. For me, it's about creating constellations in which light can show itself." The artist plays with changing light situations and explores the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, always understanding the process of perception as a process of cognition. With black light, Kowanz not only questions visual habits, but also the space in connection with the works and its architectural elements, which emerge in new ways. By ostensibly reversing light and darkness, or rather the creation of light through another light, Kowanz creates a room-filling installation with "Light Steps" in which her experimental approach to light as a primary artistic design medium, as well as her exploration of the possibilities and limits of its manifestations becomes particularly visible. The installation is a key work in Kowanz' oeuvre and connects her early interest in black light, which forms the starting point for her intensive exploration of light, with the neon tube, which characterizes her later work and with which she visually thematizes the complex relationship between seeing and understanding, perceiving and recognizing.