LONDON.- The edge of perception is explored in Spencer Finch’s third solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery London. The American artist tests the limits of objectivity, pursuing poetic ends with scientific clarity. Through a new installation, light-boxes, watercolours and pastels, Finch analyses the points at which conventional vision vanishes to become something else and examines the subjective lens of each individual through discrete bodies of work.

Finch holds up an enchanted prism between the outer world and inner thought. Artworks on display consider a variety of instances in which perception is challenged and transformed: the peripheries of vision, the obfuscations of fog and the fall of darkness, camera distortions, the view of the world experienced by different species, in this case bees. Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poetry and by the movement of bees, Finch has attempted to track and map the complex paths taken in the delivery and exchange of pollen. Proceeding through careful observation, measurement and precision, Finch’s art translates the complexities of the natural world into arrangements of colour and light that are simultaneously abstract and representational, technically devised yet auratic in their effect.

His subjects are the ineffable and evanescent: the human condition of remembering or the quality of light at a given moment – all lending to a full comprehension of nature in spite of man’s technological advancement. In the impossibility of their undertaking, his endeavours are frequently Sisyphean, matching a Herculean task with a touch that is deliberately slight and human, with the ultimate aim of igniting wonder. “To make an honest picture, you have to fail and fail repeatedly,” Finch has said, “because you can never capture how something actually looks.”

Spencer Finch is best known for ethereal light installations that visualise his experience of natural phenomena and for his important commissions in the public realm. Among these are Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning (2014) the only artwork commissioned for the September 11 Memorial Museum, a vast, yet delicate installation consisting of 2,983 individual squares of paper — one for each life lost and each hand-painted by the artist to match his memory of the crystalline blue sky on the day of the attacks; and The River That Flows Both Ways (2009), a meditation on the Hudson river that forms part of New York’s High Line which distils photographic documentation of an eleven hour journey along the river into a grid of coloured panes of glass, their muted yet glowing hues reflecting the infinitely nuanced translucency of the river’s waters. In London next year, Finch’s commission for London’s Cross Rail development at Paddington will be unveiled: A Cloud Index, a multi-coloured glass canopy whose individually coloured panes provide a panoptic meditation on the station’s role as the gateway to the West.

Spencer Finch was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1962 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has a BA in comparative literature from Hamilton College, Clinton, New York (1985) and an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (1989). Solo exhibitions include ‘Ulysses’, Marfa Contemporary, Texas (2014); ‘A Certain Slant of Light’, Morgan Library, New York (2014); ‘Spencer Finch: The Skies can’t keep their secret’, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2014), Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (2013), the Art Institute of Chicago (2011), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2007) and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2003). He participated in the Folkestone Triennial, UK (2011), the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) and ‘Another Minimalism: Art After California Light and Space’, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2015).