The Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce LUCAS KIERS: EVOLUTION, a show of photographs revealing the artist’s life-long photographic journey from passive recorder of illumination to master and creator of light and shadow.
Born in the Netherlands in 1941, Lucas Kiers began drawing at age twelve. At this time, while returning to Holland by boat, Kiers met Milton Glaser, one of the most influential American graphic designers of the twentieth century [Glaser would later go on to have solo exhibitions at both the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.] Glaser praised Kiers’ portraits and encouraged the young artist to pursue art. Six years later, Kiers attended the Los Angeles Art Center College of Design, where he formally studied the works of influential designers, including Milton Glaser. For a full decade following graduation, Kiers worked as an Art Director and freelance designer.
It was during the late 1960s that Kiers began to experiment with photography, predominantly engaging in documentary photography. While citing his early influences as Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Krause (who he met in 1963 while working as an Art Director), his early works consistently reflect the artist’s fascination with light and shadow. Later, during the 1980’s, Kiers focused on the abstract qualities of light cast onto tangible elements. For example, in his work Untitled, 1989 [Kiers’ still life of a lamp], the lampshade pattern projected onto the wall takes on a textured quality that eclipses the central lamp figure. This photograph and other early works from the 1980’s form the reference point from which LUCAS KIERS: EVOLUTION begins.
From the mid to late 1990s, Kiers focused more and more time on the abstract qualities of light, rather than on objects. Kiers perceived the ground and walls as canvases, upon which nature paints with light to form shapes and pattern. Crisscrossing lines formed by shadows, cracks, and light reduce the photographic canvas to geometric composites. His image of footprints scattered in sand cleverly mimics the indexical trace the camera imprints onto film each time a photograph is taken. This image is juxtaposed by an image of unmarked sand, which illustrates the artist’s evolutionary path towards minimalist simplicity.
In 1999, Lucas Kiers’ work took its greatest evolutionary leap. During this time, the artist relinquished his role in the photographic process as a passive recorder of light and shadow in favor of the position of active creator. By first creating a large canvas made of paint, collage, and drawings, then placing the work in a dark room, Kiers was able to use his own external light source (a light stick) to literally draw onto the negative during 15 minute exposures. The final result: a complex photograph completely synthetic in nature, yet natural in its creation. Kiers masters light in the photographic process and keeps true to the definition of photography – “to write with light.”