Light Mystery

Joseph Nechvatal

born 1951

Light Mystery, 1984

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: paper; graphite

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 28 x 35.6 cm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 11 1/2 x 14 1/2 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 16 x 20 in

Credit line: The Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services

Accession number: 2009.0060

Not on display

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Exhibition Label: "NetWorks: Art and Artists from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection," Mar-2011, Susan Earle, Stephen Goddard, and SMA Interns Joseph Nechvatal makes a connection between the drawings in this series and the ceiling of the Apse at Lascaux, a cave in Southern France decorated with Paleolithic designs, believed to be one of the oldest extant examples of human art in the world. He is fascinated by the cave’s profusion of overlapping, “stockpiled” images, writing that: “…This fine jumble of delicate lines, some beautifully representational and others again not, corresponded to the prolonged series of grayish drawings with which I began my career as an artist: drawings which had partially been conceived as a shadow of our nervous system’s meshed neural signs mingling with nuclear catastrophe.” A close study of Nechvatal’s drawing, Light Mystery, reveals unexpected images that surface from his mesh of pencil marks: a folding chair, a Smurf, a male nude. Since the 1980s, Nechvatal’s art has evolved in pace with technology, and today he is recognized as a vanguard in the study of art and virtual reality.