“Looking back on an oeuvre spanning more than half a century, all I can say is that I haven’t shot my bolt. The passion for light I frst felt as a child remains undiminished, and my love of experimentation is stronger than ever.”
Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska presents a retrospective of the internationally renowned Swiss pioneer of light art CHRISTIAN HERDEG (Zurich 1942). For over ffty-fve years, HERDEG has continually harnessed the means of art to probe the optical and physical properties of light. Over the years, he has developed a distinctive formal idiom based on the functional and aesthetic conjunction of color, light, surface, and space. He makes neon objects that he complements with selected materials like aluminum, acrylic glass, wood, rubber, stone, and monochrome canvases. A photographer, lighting technician, and cinematographer by training, he was among the frst artists in Europe to dedicate himself to exploring the evanescent medium of light; his neon sculptures were an absolute novelty in Switzerland and put the form on the map. He now ranks among the recognized pioneers of light art: “My art is what it is. Immaterial and perhaps dark in only a moment. But that-the luminous instant-is precisely what appeals to people,” HERDEG emphasizes.
The presentation opens with the signifcant debut pieces Playlights (1969). Exponents of minimal and conceptual art like Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman in the U.S. and Lucio Fontana in Italy had been experimenting with fuorescent tubes and the light emitted by noble gases since the early 1960s; HERDEG, by contrast, frst starts working with incandescent bulbs during an extended stay in Canada. Mounted on monochrome square panes of acrylic glass are thirty-six red and blue lightbulbs that light up and go dark at irregular intervals and in varying patterns. Concurrently, he also uses a small selection of neon tubes to investigate the efect of the immaterial medium of light. In the wall objects From Violet to Rose (1973) and Great Breeze (1975), he places neon and argon tubes in soft tones side by side on white wooden boards to bring the perception of colored lights into focus. His neon pieces are increasingly popular with audiences. While the early works are informed by the aesthetic of commercial advertising and pop art, in the years that follow, the artist develops sculptures that anticipate the geometric formal vocabulary and the preference for cooler hues that still defne his output today.
In 1982, setting a neoprene rod and a blue argon tube in a crosswise arrangement yields the wall installation Two Energies. HERDEG once more condenses and reduces his formal means of expression. He also adds black light to his creative repertoire, which facilitates an expanded perception of virtual spaces. The combination of neon tubes, geometric bodies, and diverse materials plays an increasingly salient part. The “narrative efusiveness” [sic] of the early work gives way to rigorous reduction.
The iconic series Circle Meets Square (1996–2009), which stages encounters between the two titular basic geometric shapes, inaugurates a new chapter in the artist’s exploration of the efect of artifcial light. By placing an evenly painted MDF panel and a circular neon tube side by side, he achieves a union of painting and light art as equals. The result brings home to the beholder that the perception of a color and a shape is always infuenced by the surroundings.
With the recent works Mono Blue (2024) and Black Light Organism (2023), HERDEG again demonstrates that, aesthetic lucidity and minimalist austerity notwithstanding, his light objects always exude an air of mysticism and poetry. The argon and black light rods placed apparently at random look like veins in which a bluish sheen courses, pointing the way to a dimension of expanded perception.
CHRISTIAN HERDEG’s works have been featured in numerous international exhibitions and are held by major institutional and private collections. His art-in-architecture projects have made defning marks on the urban fabrics of numerous cities, including Zurich, Basel, Munich, Frankfurt am Main, Oslo, and Seoul. In 2021, HERDEG was honored with the Culture Prize of the Canton of Zurich for his “undimmed fascination with the power of light to both take up and create space.”
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