SEOUL.- Esther Schipper will present  September in Seoul, Ann Veronica Janssens’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, her first in Seoul. September in Seoul brings together sculptures made from glass and from light.

Since the late 1970s, Janssens has developed an artistic practice based on light, color, and natural optical phenomena. She continuously experiments with the characteristic attributes of carefully chosen materials (glass, mirrors, aluminum, artificial fog), shapes, and light, wielding our perception of reality as her medium. Her works give the impression of great simplicity yet create vivid experiences of the act of seeing. With their sense of constant transformation, the works heighten the viewers awareness of the mutability and transience of human cognition.

At the center of the September in Seoul is a body of work that highlights the Minimalist influence underlying the elegant simplicity characteristic of Janssens’s work. The seriality of the repeating rectangular shapes that create the structures ‒ here of 4, 32, and 75 elements, in dark green, green-yellow, pink or lilac ‒ is undercut by the uniqueness of each of the glass bricks with its slight variations and tiny inclusions of bubbles. The strictness of the gridded arrangement dissolves as the light plays on the different surfaces. Nestled pattern and maze-like impressions of infinite spaces, create an intricate, ever-changing architecture of light and color held seemingly “within” the sculptural objects. The series of works evolves from Ann Veronica Janssens’ previous experiments, such as her constructions of cement blocks. Here, the glass has replaced the cement and plays with the light and the characteristics of the material.

On the third floor, a work consisting of a block of optical glass similarly seems to respond to its surroundings. Clearer and more transparent than commonly produced glass, it retains the shape of the raw casting from its cooling process. As we move around the work, the outside world appears caught inside, existing in some shape inside the intensely luminous block of glass. Despite its stillness, the material has a dynamic quality, as if “drinking the light” of its environment. Janssens’s “performative sculptures” require observers to move to fully experience them. We peer into the blocks of optical glass and tilt our head to see the light miraculously caught in their interior.

But a nearby work gives the lights and colors caught in the block a special quality. They are being produced by another work by Janssens. The new light sculpture ‒ from a unique series the artist began in 2005 ‒ permeates the space, traveling through the staircase to reshape its architecture, letting visitors experience the space anew, modulated by light and color. A lamp with a dichroic filter is placed in such a way that its light creates a range of colors that suffuse the space in a glow. The observer’s perception of color in space is the sculpture, which is another instance of the experiential quality integral to Janssens’s work and her longstanding “dematerialization” of art objects. The architecture becomes integral to the work and its experience. Traveling from one floor to another, Janssens sculpture gives form to the permeability of our environment, making visible a phenomenon ‒ how air, sound and indeed light permeates different spaces ‒ that is usually taken for granted.