Lighting up the Queen

So if you missed the Hayward Gallery’s stunning Light show earlier this year, a forthcoming exhibition by light artist Chris Levine may offer some illuminating compensation.

Levine’s new retrospective at London’s Fine Art Society is the artist’s first major London solo show, and will showcase perhaps his most famous work, Lightness of Being, his 2007 portrait of the Queen.

The artist has also turned his hand to creating an image of one of the other most famous women in Britain, Kate Moss, with his image She’s Light, which will form the centrepiece of the exhibition.

To realise the portraits, Levine makes his subjects sit before a special camera that creates a hologram-like, eerily realistic effect by shooting multiple images to form the final 3D lenticular-light work.

As well as the portraits, a number of immersive light installations will also be on show alongside some new figurative pieces.

The show will be spread across the two main floors of the gallery, and the gallery says Levine will ‘interrupt the natural light in the gallery to create his own atmospheric environment, which acts as both the subject and setting for his immersive light experiences.’

The gallery goes on, ‘Levine aims to turn down the volume on the world around us and focus attention on the energy of light, the very thing at the core of all matter and space, and in doing so induce a meditative state in the viewer.’

Chris Levine, Light 3.142 runs from 17 May – 15 June at The Fine Art Society
148 New Bond Street
, London W1S