Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to announce Sculpted Light, a group exhibition featuring five artists, to commence the gallery’s 45th anniversary year. Inspired by Elizabeth Leach’s close ties to the Light and Space Movement of the 1970s, Sculpted Light brings together the work of Dan Flavin, Peter Gronquist, Fabiola Menchelli, Gregg Renfrow, and Hap Tivey. Across generations and through various techniques, these artists demonstrate how light can be shaped, contained, reflected and dispersed, serving simultaneously as medium and subject.
The exhibition emphasizes the sculptural nature of light-based practices, presenting illumination-activated works for which light defines forms and shapes perceptions. Whether through fluorescent tubes, photographic processes, or experimental constructions, each artist engages light as a physical and conceptual medium.
Peter Gronquist’s work bridges sculpture and painting, and allows ambient light to reflect off of underlying surfaces, impacting the intensity of color the viewer perceives. Fabiola Menchelli, using photographic processes but no camera, transforms light into a record of time and material interaction on folded photo paper, giving three dimensional form to the abstract. Dan Flavin’s pioneering use of commercially available fluorescent fixtures established a radical language in which light itself becomes sculpture, altering the viewer’s relationship to space and scale. Gregg Renfrow and Hap Tivey extend this legacy through material-driven practices that fuse light with industrial materials and constructed forms, with Renfrow placing an emphasis on surface and Tivey emphasizing depth and perception. Elizabeth Leach Gallery first exhibited Hap Tivey’s work in 1981, making his the longest relationship with the gallery. Tivey’s work was featured in the 2023 exhibition, Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is also currently on view at the Portland Art Museum.
Sculpted Light offers a meditation on contemporary and historical approaches to the use of light as a medium, and how it can be shaped and manipulated to produce new visual and conceptual experiences. In addition to launching the gallery's 45th anniversary program, the exhibition intentionally coincides with the Portland Art Museum’s new exhibition Im/Material, which focuses on artists with “idea-driven practices, [with] material exploration,” and includes work by both Dan Flavin and Hap Tivey. This continues the gallery's tradition of presenting artist's work who are also part of a larger conceptual conversation and context nationally and globally.
