LOS ANGELES, CALIF.- David Kordansky Gallery is presenting Cylindrical Lenses, an exhibition of new sculptures by Fred Eversley. The exhibition is on view in Los Angeles at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl. from September 13 through October 19, 2024. This exhibition marks the first solo presentation of Cylindrical Lenses in Los Angeles, opening in conjunction with PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a landmark regional event presented by Getty that explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. Eversley is included in two PST ART group exhibitions, Lumen: The Art & Science of Light at Getty Center and Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Modern Physics, 1945–1980 at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Eversley is a pioneering artist with an early and long-standing affiliation with the Light and Space movement. Cylindrical Lenses features Eversley’s largest assemblage to date of these new grand, freestanding resin sculptures in which the artist’s lifelong research into the physical and metaphysical properties of energy takes subtle, complex, and immersive new form.
The Cylindrical Lenses arise out of the artist’s abiding interest in rendering the energy-driven properties of the parabola as large-scale, immersive optical sculptures. This series is the realization of a vision to increase the scale of smaller, early cylindrical sections of dyed resin that emerged ahead of Eversley’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. This vision of creating vertical cut-cylindrical sculptures in formats from to six to ten feet tall had never been fully executed until 2022. The results are works with both monumental presence and the ability to express an interactive, kinetic spectra.
For this exhibition, Eversley has created a dynamic ensemble of eleven luminous Cylindrical Lenses, each between seven and ten feet tall and arranged in four rows that reach toward the light which enters through the gallery’s skylight. Each work’s tapered section arises from either a half or three-quarter cylindrical shape drawing the gaze upward towards its parabolic apex. These geometrically simple, yet sophisticated, forms focus attention on their visual and physical features, as well as the precision with which Eversley brings to his medium, providing a phenomenological point of contact. They also contain shifting refractions and reflections that reveal the sculptural properties of light itself. Both celestial and corporeal, each unique shape—with its hue gradually saturated in its parabolic arched volume—occupies space and light as a perfect optical instrument, becoming a portal from ordinary reality to transcendental planes.
The transparent masses on view are ordered with variant hues of lightness and darkness, from lighter tones of amber, violet, and pink, to deeper saturations in red, blue, and green, allowing viewers to see through multi-colored alignments. Each work changes dramatically with changes in light intensity, color temperature, direction, and the relative angle of the spectator to both the light source and the work. Additionally, all surrounding environmental factors are mirrored in various ways in the internal space of each work; in each case allowing several other sculptures to be superimposed and seen from various directions. This affects the relationships between all cylinders on view, generating a constantly shifting experience in which viewers’ movements through the space allow them to observe seemingly infinite combinations of spectra and prismatic effects within the works and projected on their surrounds.
The exhibition demonstrates how this key performative facet, the fundamental basis of Eversley’s mission, is elevated to new dimensions. The space becomes an arena for spectators to engage in a spirit of play with these objects—in the past, Eversley has referred to his objects as “toys”—and to explore them over time. Whether alone or together with other viewers, this important social dimension of the work challenges the notion of viewing as an isolated act as viewers’ bodies are visually transformed and become fluid, distorted, and multiplied, shifting and dissolving depending on the angle of the light and the viewer’s position.
The works on view emphasize the connections between the different kinds of energy that appear in the visual, physical, and metaphysical fields, generating an enlivening, mystifying landscape where stillness and motion appear to be present at the same time. They are manifestations of Eversley’s persistent innovation and continued exploration of the hypothesis-based procedures of scientific research that are the foundation not only of technological progress, but of humanity’s constantly evolving capacity to understand, celebrate, and reimagine its place among the mysteries of the universe.
In the late fall of 2024, Fred Eversley’s (b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York) largest public sculptural installation for permanent display, titled Portals, commissioned by Related Companies in a public-private partnership with the City of West Palm Beach, will be inaugurated in Julian Abele Park at One Flagler. From 2023 – 2024, Public Art Fund presented the outdoor installation Fred Eversley: Parabolic Light at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York’s Central Park. Eversley will be included in the major group exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, opening November 17, 2024, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Eversley has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California (2022–2023); Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (2017); Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2016); National Academy of Science, Washington, D.C. (1981); Palm Springs Art Museum, California (1977); Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California (1976); and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1970). Recent group exhibitions include Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023); Light and Space, Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen (2021–2022); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983 (2017–2020, traveled to five venues); Space Shifters, Hayward Gallery, London (2018); Dynamo – A Century of Light and Motion in Art, Grand Palais, Paris (2013); Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 (Getty Foundation, 2011; traveled to Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2012). His work is in the permanent collections of more than three dozen museums throughout the world, including Tate Modern, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Museum of Modern Art, New York; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The first monograph dedicated to Eversley’s work was published by David Kordansky Gallery in 2022. Eversley lives and works in New York City.
