NEW YORK, NY.- Anna Zorina Gallery is presenting Second Nature, Andrew Lyght’s first exhibition with the Gallery. The show features works spanning multiple series that are united in the merger of dualistic qualities such as painting and sculpture, industrial and ornamental, raw and refined. The deconstruction and reassembling of compositional elements situates the viewer within a dynamic space of line, plane, volume and color to inspire a new way of seeing and relating to the environment.
Lyght’s technique is inspired by his youth spent in the South American nation of Guyana. As a child he was often found on the docks with his sailor uncles, “I was fascinated to look at the waterline where the hull meets the water surface, the rust area, where the paint would chip off and expose the steel causing it to rust. The surface of the huge hull of the ship looked to me as a big abstract painting.” As oil drums were offloaded from the boats, the artist remarked on the creative potential of the vessels and considered them to be “industrial pottery.” For pocket money, Lyght would fix bicycles as well as make and sell kites thus developing not only techniques and skills for fabricating but also a confidence to experiment with non-traditional materials such as twine, bamboo, plywood, oil drums, and metal ladders. These formative elements of childhood memory and ingenuity continue to inform the conceptual basis of his work.
This lifelong fascination with exploring the boundaries of construction has resulted in a fluent approach to his creative process. Lyght describes the freehanded application of his vivid, glyphlike lines as an act of meditation. The fluid drawings appear as an obscure blueprint outlining forms that communicate a significance to an outside or ancient culture. When inscribed upon mechanical objects, these gestures evoke the complex coexistence of organic forms of life within modern industrial structures.
Andrew Lyght (b. 1949, Georgetown, Guyana) has been featured in notable exhibitions including solo shows at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, NY; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA.; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY as well as the group presentation of Global Arts Africa at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York. Lyght was an artist in residence at MoMA P.S. 1, Long Island City from 1978-80. He received major grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in 2010 and the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation in 2004. His work is held in collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Jewish Museum, New York; the World Bank Art Program, Washington, D.C.; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA.
Andrew Lyght was introduced to the gallery by independent curator, Dexter Wimberly who had been following his career closely for several years.
