SARATOGA, CA.- Bruce Munro at Montalvo: Stories in Light, a world premiere exhibition by internationally-acclaimed artist Bruce Munro, is on view at Montalvo Arts Center, located on 175 acres in the Silicon Valley, Saratoga Hills. Montalvo has been illuminated by 10 of Munro’s light-based works installed throughout the center’s lawns, gardens, terraces, and historic structures in his first public West Coast exhibition. Bruce Munro at Montalvo: Stories in Light runs through March 17, 2019 at Montalvo Arts Center.

Inspired by the artist’s readings of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the installations of Bruce Munro range in scale from enormous and immersive to intimate, utilizing hundreds of thousands of bespoke components to construct multi-hued waves, clusters, cascades, flocks, and seas of light, transforming Montalvo’s historic Villa and extensive public areas into a breathtaking spectacle of illumination. Featuring the largest number of works by Munro ever on public display at a single venue, this exhibition is expected to attract visitors from around the world to the Saratoga arts center.

“Bruce Munro at Montalvo is the most ambitious, impactful exhibition Montalvo has ever presented,” said Montalvo Executive Director Angela McConnell. “With anticipated attendance in the tens of thousands, we believe this show will elevate Montalvo—and the town of Saratoga—to increased relevance and prestige in the national and international art scene. With the generous support of The Valley Foundation, we look forward to inspiring and delighting visitors from across the Bay Area and beyond.

Munro’s oeuvre, which blends the highly personal with the poignantly universal, aims to transcend time and space by inspiring moments of awareness, and invites viewers to contemplate a world larger and more mysterious than their own existences. Smithsonian Magazine has called Munro’s work “stunning,” while The Guardian noted, “This is art you feel, rather than art you view.” The Washington Post wrote, “Munro is to fiber optics, you might say, as Dale Chihuly is to blown glass and Christo to wrapped fabric, an artist whose outdoor installations intensify their subject landscapes.” The Huffington Post said, “It can be hard to describe in words the gifts that Munro bestows on the landscape as his work escapes description in either written or photographic form, it is something to be experienced.” Theoretical physicist/Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek noted, “I had the uncanny sense that I was walking through my own mind, or at least a good model of it. I’ll never again think about brains, or myself, in quite the same way.”

When Munro was invited to Montalvo in 2016 to consider its property as a possible site for a new exhibition, he experienced a profound moment of what he calls “powerful literary connection.” He was immediately struck by the grounds’ resemblance to a house and garden that feature prominently in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third book in C.S. Lewis’s much beloved series of novels, The Chronicles of Narnia. “While always a literary reference point, over the years I have appreciated the subtle changes of my understanding towards these books and it is only relatively recently that I recognized that they have inspired thoughts and feelings worthy of abstracting into art installations,” said Munro. “My immediate response was to see Montalvo as a unifying canvas, a place to draw all these ideas together, the landscape continually inspiring and directing my imagination.” Thus, this exhibition at Montalvo is the artist’s first to be driven by a unifying theme, rather than a disparate set of concepts.

Among Bruce Munro at Montalvo’s various nods to Lewis’s works, Montalvo’s large Great Lawn has been covered by a sea of “lily pads” created from over 4,000 illuminated stems in an installation entitled Silver Sea – named for Narnia’s flowing freshwater ocean (called “drinkable light” by the character Prince Caspian). A flamboyance of flamingos, densely clustered on Montalvo’s Garden Terrace and illuminated in sunset hues, pays tribute to Ramandu’s Table (on which food magically appeared every day to feed a flock of pure white sun-birds), while a metal tree of glowing lights alludes to the Parliament of Owls (the talking birds who met nightly to discuss the affairs of Narnia). Over the grand staircase in Montalvo’s historically landmarked Villa, a 106-year-old stained glass window depicting the three sailing ships of explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo has been illuminated to create the illusion of movement, in allusion to Prince Caspian’s galleon, the Dawn Treader, voyaging across mythological seas. Also inspired by the Narnia books is the massive Reepicheep’s Wave, which has been installed on Montalvo’s Garden Theatre stage. The wave, made of 15,000 vacuum cast mussel shells, formed from ocean plastics, suspended on illuminated optical fibers, is a representation of a beautiful visual metaphor employed by Lewis in the last chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to convey a journey taken from one reality to another. This is a new installation created expressly for the Montalvo exhibition.

At the same time, however, the installations comment on the landscape they illuminate and draw from the artist’s personal recollections as well as society’s collective memories and stories. Reepicheep’s Wave is equally inspired by Munro’s teenage fascination with the 1977 film The Last Wave, in which a monstrous typhoon is poised to destroy New Zealand and by the woodblock print The Great Wave at Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai. A man-made forest of illuminated acrylic clothespins, installed in the Italianate Garden and paired with a soundtrack of cackling Australian cockatoos, is inspired by Munro’s recollection of anthropomorphic animals in Lewis’s work, but it is also an expression of nostalgia for when he, as a young man and budding artist, lived in Australia with the woman who would become his wife.

London-born Bruce Munro is best known for large-scale light-based artworks inspired largely by his continuous study of natural light and his curiosity for shared human experiences. With a fine arts degree, early career training in the lighting design industry, and an inventive urge for reuse, his art captures his responses to literature, music, science, and the world around him. His work has been commissioned by and displayed in special exhibitions in galleries, parks, grand estates, cathedrals, botanical gardens, and museums across the globe, including Longwood Gardens, PA; the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Sharjah Museum of Art, UAE; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Desert Botanical Garden, AZ; the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, CO; Sotheby’s Beyond Limits at Chatworth; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschild Collection, Buckinghamshire; and Salisbury Cathedral, among others. Artworks by Munro are held in the permanent collections of museums and public art collections worldwide including the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology, Oxford; Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Art Museum, TN; and Texas Tech University Public Art. His installation Field of Light is currently on display at Uluru, Northern Territories in Australia through December 2020. This solo exhibition—Munro’s first in Australia—features an installation of 50,000 spheres of light, and represents the largest and most remote iteration of his artwork to date.