b. 1946
Photo: Darren O’Brien/Guzelia
Anthony McCall is widely recognized for his ‘solid-light’ installations, hybrid works between sculpture, drawing, and cinema in which beams of light that inscribe three-dimensional forms into haze-filled interiors are projected into space.
Active in the avant-garde cinema communities of London and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, McCall began working in film and performance before developing his ‘solid-light’ installations, beginning with Line Describing A Cone, 1973. In this iconic work, audiences moved freely within the space as a three-dimensional cone of light slowly emerged from a projector. P. Adams Sitney, in his landmark history of avant-garde cinema, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, described McCall’s installations of the 1970s as, “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.” Since the 1990s, technological advancements have allowed McCall to continue to develop these installations, to involve multiple projectors inscribing increasingly complex and interwoven forms. Recent solid-light works such as Split Second consist of multiple, interpenetrating solid-light forms creating a dynamic, activated space. McCall’s work makes visible the immaterial qualities of cinema, including light, space, and duration. His installations liberate the viewer to engage with their materials through both the body and the eye.
The historical importance of Anthony McCall’s work has been internationally recognized through numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the Futura Museum, Korea, 2025; Tate Modern, UK, 2024; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, 2024; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, US, 2019; Pioneer Works, US, 2018; and the Hepworth Wakefield, UK, 2018.
McCall has also been featured in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions at major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Serpentine Gallery, London; and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, among others.
Anthony McCall currently lives and works in New York.
