- Venue
- Daniel Benjamin Gallery
- Starts
- Friday, December 20, 2019
- Ends
- Saturday, February 15, 2020
- Address
- 120 Kensington Park Road London W11 2PW
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- Daniel Benjamin Gallery
LUCE features the works of two UK-based artists and their attempt to explore the intricate relationship between architecture and light and the human responses these two invoke. Together Liz West’s and Jemma Appleby’s works unravel the ways in which we conceive the spaces we inhabit by heightening our awareness and experience of light.
A luminous light installation by British artist Liz West will beam through the gallery’s windows, basking the surrounding streets in vibrancy after dark and lighting up Notting Hill for a unique, immersive show.
Renowned for creating vivid and sensory environments through her manipulation of light, Liz West’s Our Spectral Vision is a large-scale installation that replicates the process of diverting white light through large-scale prisms made of dichroic glass. Exhibited on the first-floor of the gallery, visitors are encouraged to submerge themselves in the rich, saturated light that will drench the room with colour. West explains the “understanding of colour can only be realised through the presence of light”, and with Our Spectral Vision the seven visible parts of the colour spectrum will transform the gallery space into a realm of imagination and exploration.
Downstairs a series of artworks by London based artist Jemma Appleby offer new perspectives on architectural spaces and our concept of space. Appleby grinds black charcoal on paper with her bare hands in a unique creative process that allows for no mistakes. In each of her hypnotising drawings, only parts of the buildings are shown, suggesting that the architecture is not the focus point but an accessory to the protagonist of the work, the light. As Appleby herself acknowledges, the artworks “amplify each environment’s simplicity and purity with an aim of clarification. These clean minimal spaces offer little information yet have an authority to describe a magnitude.”
While West’s captivating work arrests attention as visitors watch the colours dance inside the colourful bands of light, Appleby’s serene drawings on the lower ground floor offer a moment of reflection, subtly reminding that light has the power to mask and reveal at its own discretion.
