Emil Salto: Light Forms

Oct 14, 2014 - Jan 3, 2015

For Danish artist Emil Salto, light experiments are a form of intuitive yet systematic inquiry. The results of Salto's experiments are carefully modulated interactions with light and shadow: monochromes, photograms, and films. Salto uses light as an agent, through which we can touch on questions of time and space, optics and perception.

For his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, several series of photographs and films are shown together. The artist has also created two light and color installations that reach beyond the discrete image to envelop the viewer and choreograph shadows.

In the obscurity of the darkroom, Salto casts light on photosensitive materials, inserting body into the composition between exposures. Chance tempers the discipline of his working process, which is calibrated to the medium at hand—whether that is analog (celluloid) film or handmade laminated 35mm slides, objects casting shadows, or light itself.

Salto draws upon modernism's language of abstraction and, above all, its restless spirit of experimentation. His work is kindred to artists of international movements of the 20th and 21st centuries such as Bauhaus, the Zero Group and, more unexpectedly, the American Light and Space movement. These movements, like his work, are primarily motivated by the question of how art can continually shift perception, pointing us back to the elasticity of time and light.

Artist Biography

Emil Salto lives and works in Denmark. He completed his studies at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Solo exhibitions in Europe include: Untitled Drama, Melk Gallery in Oslo, Norway; Aethers through Squares, Henningsen Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark; and Formløshedens form, Randers Kunstmuseum in Randers, Denmark. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions. In 2016, he will unveil a public commission for the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. This is Salto's first solo museum show in the United States.

Curated by Cora Fisher, SECCA Curator of Contemporary Art.

Exhibition Catalogue Available

Exhibition support for Emil Salto Light Forms is granted by the Danish Arts Foundation.