At Avignon’s Grenier du Sel, 14 living artists enter into dialogue with the legacy of Nicolas Schöffer, the Franco-Hungarian pioneer of spatio-dynamic cybernetic light art.
Exhibition View, “Lumière, Espace, Temps” (“Light, Space, Time”), the Grenier à Sel in Avignon.
© Grégoire Edouard
Though most people today would draw a blank at his name, Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) was practically a household celebrity in 1970s France. Building on the legacy of fellow Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy—inventor, in the 1920s, of the celebrated Light Space Modulator —, Schöffer, who moved to Paris in 1936, began to experiment with spatio-dynamic kinetic light sculptures in the late 1950s. Taking Moholy-Nagy’s ideas one step further, he produced robotic cybernetic pieces that could travel through space autonomously and—an art-historical first— incorporated electronic computation to achieve a certain degree of interactivity. As the swinging 60s morphed into the psychedelic…
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