Anthony McCall
February 22–May 5, 2013
les Abattoirs
76 Allées Charles de Fitte
31300 Toulouse, France
Invited to take over les Abattoirs, Anthony McCall set up a series of solid light works. Visitors start from the basement and along their course, they can discover 6 of his recent creations where the artist stages a dialogue between his horizontal and his vertical works for the first time in France.
Anthony McCall was born in 1946 in England. The body of work he has developed from the early 1970s is part minimal and conceptual art, performance and cinema. It is nowadays considered fundamental in the development of art in the last 30 years. Film was first used by the artist to record his own actions and ephemeral installations; it consecutively became the subject itself. Anthony McCall created his first “solid light film” titled Line describing a cone in 1973, the year he went to live in New York. His movie focuses on the essential elements of cinéma—light, length—but with a totally reversed angle: it is no longer on screen but in space. It develops in a smoky area between projector and screen, in the viewer’s space. From this revolutionary turning point, the artist led a series of work for multiple or individual projectors during 10 years or so: a universe of light in which conceptual rigor was only matched by the sense of marvel they created.
