Auckland Art Gallery’s major new exhibition is a sensory delight.

Light from Tate: 1700s to Now opened this week, curated from the famous British gallery’s collections to feature nearly 100 works that explore, celebrate and contend with light – as both a subject and medium.

The exhibition, which showed at Melbourne's ACMI in June last year, includes more than 70 big-name artists and traverses three centuries.

Never miss a moment. Make sure you're subscribed to our newsletter today.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Head along to see paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, film works and moving light projections, as the artists grappled with the issues of their time through artistic explorations of light – whether that be spirituality, religion, science or ever-evolving technology.

This show traces that trajectory. Following a roughly chronological journey, classic works by the likes of J.M.W Turner, John Constable, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley are interspersed with contemporary pieces from Olafur Eliasson, Yayoi Kusama, Liliane Lijn, James Turrell and more, allowing for new contrasts and connections to be made.

In one of the rooms, for example, paintings by late impressionists Georges Seurat (1859-1891) and Albert Dubois-Pillet (1846-1890) are displayed next to a chrome, dotted creation called The Passing Winter made by Yayoi Kusama in 2005. Seurat and Dubois-Pillet used many tiny dots of colour to create their landscapes and societal scenes, and this exhibition pairs these with Kusama's intriguing silver box to respond to her signature use of dots.

Pieces from Auckland Art Gallery’s permanent collection have also been interspersed throughout the New Zealand iteration of this exhibition.

In a room titled Colour Play, you can see the famous Homage to the Square paintings by Bauhaus artist Josef Albers. In the next (darkened) room, Danish artist Olaf Eliasson’s 2003 work Yellow versus Purple involves a large yellow glass disc that spins, from a steel cable linked to a motor attached to the ceiling. It is juxtaposed by a purple floodlight that travels around the walls of the room, illuminating the viewers as it passes.

You’ll be surrounded by glowing colour that seems to pulse with a life of its own with James Turrell’s all-consuming Raemar, Blue, and face possible sensory overload with Lis Rhodes’s Light Music, 1975, with its black and white projected light that flickers and overlaps in a large room of its own.

The paintings make for more serene viewing. John Beck’s The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs (1871) is a sublime depiction of sunlight on the sea, and impressionist paintings by Monet, Pissarro and Sisley nod to a shift from studio-based practices to open-air nature studies.

A common theme throughout the exhibition is light as a source of hope. As you move through this exhibition, you may find it’s impossible to ignore the effect light has on us as human beings, and no doubt you’ll look at light differently when you step back into the world.

Light from Tate: 1700s to Now. Showing until June 25, 2023.

Additional reporting by Elizabeth Flux

aucklandartgallery.com