GROUP EXHIBITION

Perfetti’s curatorial approach is shaped by her upbringing in northern Swedish Lapland, where extreme shifts between summer brightness and winter darkness—often punctuated by the Northern Lights—made light a defining element of daily life. She notes, ‘Light continues to symbolize knowledge and transformation—from yin and yang in Chinese philosophy to the Enlightenment in the West. The artists in this exhibition use light to shift perception, ignite emotion and question authority.’

Light has long played a central role in art history. From Vilhelm Hammershøi’s atmospheric interiors and William Turner’s explorations of luminosity to the Impressionists’ studies of perception, artists have continually examined how light shapes visual experience. Frank Bowling carries this tradition forward through layered abstraction, influenced by the landscapes of his native Guyana and the treatment of light in works by Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. His painting ‘Untitled’ (ca. 1978), a vibrant acrylic and collage on canvas, evokes the warmth of a sunset—its layered colours capturing fleeting light in motion.

Larry Bell approaches light as a physical phenomenon shaped by material and space. A coated glass sculpture on view exemplifies this, transforming light into a dynamic perceptual experience. ‘Although we tend to think of glass as a window,’ Bell explains, ‘it is a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive qualities: it reflects light, it absorbs light, and it transmits light all at the same time.’

Pipilotti Rist engages light on a different register—emotional, immersive and metaphorical. A pioneer of spatial video art, she creates installations that flood environments with saturated color and glowing projections. Her new work for the St. Moritz exhibition, ‘Tine füllt das Öl nach ’ (2025), features a glowing vertical screen set in sanded red acrylic glass within a mirrored frame. Radiating saturated colour and scattered with translucent forms, the piece immerses viewers in a sensory field where light, reflection and surface blur the boundaries between technology and nature, perception and the subconscious.