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LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK features a new series of works by Louise Lawler

The longer one looks at Lawler’s exceptionally large-scale works, the stronger the spell they cast. The experience of them is immersive, triggering eye reactions similar to those we know from dark nights and unlit rooms: the pupil, retina, optic nerve and brain re-adjust to the image’s new lighting conditions to allow us to see better and more, make out smaller and finer details, perceive the works with growing clarity. In a sense, these photographs—created in the museum’s nocturnal hours—prompt a kind of night vision, an adaption of the eye to the dark. They succeed in nothing less than transforming the viewer’s visual perception. Even beyond their visual quality, Lawler’s images are characterized by a striking aesthetic density. The aluminium plates on which they are printed give the photographs themselves a sculptural quality. Their materiality mirrors Judd’s works in that regard.

Viewers stand confronted with a sober, yet almost entrancing beauty, one that draws focus to the smallest details and subtlest shifts in perception. The captured shades and hues of night have an abstract poetry all their own—broad, almost painterly graduations of dim and shadow. It is a poetry that not only makes palpable the emptiness of the exhibition spaces at night, it also lends Donald Judd’s depicted sculptures a striking new aura. We literally see them in a new light. Lawler strikes an astonishing balance here: she simultaneously lifts the veil on the nocturnal museum and keeps its mystery intact.

the reason that I really in to his work is I can find the special way to look at the sculpture which is in the dark environment and it remind me different item in the different context can create the different effect to the audience.

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