BUFFALO, NY.- Looking at Tomorrow: Light and Language from the Panza Collection, 1967–1990 celebrates the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s recent landmark acquisition of immersive light and sound installations and Minimal and Conceptual artworks from the celebrated Panza Collection. The majority of the works on view date from the 1960s and 1970s, decades in which artists across the globe redefined art by expanding its material, spatial, and temporal possibilities.

The exhibition also includes a group of works from the 1980s that reveals how a younger generation of artists continued to draw inspiration from this earlier moment. The title of the exhibition comes from Hamish Fulton’s Looking at Tomorrow (Scottish North West Highlands), 1974, a photographic series that records Fulton’s journey by foot across a mountainous region in Scotland.

Just as Fulton combines performance, text, and photography to reimagine the means by which one documents an encounter with landscape, numerous artists in Looking at Tomorrow expand the spatial possibilities of art, creating installations for the experience of light and space. A large-scale, immersive light installation by Douglas Wheeler, for example, will be an unforgettable, ethereal experience.

Other artists turn to language written on the wall, projected, printed, or appended to photographs, and marry subjects and methods associated with prose, poetry, and philosophy with the visual arts. Using language as material, these artists turned previously “non-art” situations, such as a conversation or the pages of a magazine, into works of art.

The works selected for Looking at Tomorrow broaden our understanding of what art can be and represent some of the key innovations of the period. The exhibition includes one of Sol LeWitt’s first drawings in color made directly on the wall from 1970, a rare group of six “definition” works in different languages by Joseph Kosuth, an installation of several hundred drawings by Hanne Darboven from 1972 and 1973, the captivating 1969 film Hard Core by pioneering land artist Walter De Maria, a monumental biomorphic sculptural installation by Jene Highstein, and an important early work by Lawrence Weiner, A WALL STRIPPED OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD, 1969, to name a few highlights.

These works, selections from a 2015 acquisition of forty-five installations, photographs, films, sculptures, and drawings from the Panza Collection, join a group of seventy-one paintings, sculptures, and drawings that the AK acquired from the Collection in 2007. Together, these acquisitions significantly enrich the museum’s collection of Minimalist, Conceptual, and installation art.