MICHAEL LIGHT
“100 SUNS“
Jan 30 – March 6, 2004
Opening: Friday, Jan 30, 7 p.m., the artist will be present

‘100 SUNS’ shows the detonation of “King”, Priscilla”, “Sugar”, “Zucchini” and “Climax” – just some of the names of the 216 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted above ground by the USA from 1945 to 1962. The American artist Michael Light (born *1963) has compiled historic pictures of one hundred of these tests from military archives. The result is Light’s second – after 1999's ‘FULL MOON’ – comprehensive archival project. Presented initially as a book, '100 SUNS' now appears for the first time in Europe as an exhibition and installation in our gallery. The works have been altered in size but not content, and the artist has installed stunning pigment prints according to his own concept.

Explosion follows explosion with a provocative, perverse beauty. Leading from comparatively small beginnings in the Nevada Desert to huge, indescribably destructive detonations on the atolls of the Pacific Ocean, the explosions are interspersed with mostly unaware observers in close, lethal proximity. With ‘100 SUNS’ Michael Light achieves a direct but complex work, that ably encompasses the political: the incomprehensible is visually defined and presented with an almost pornographic fascination to create a renewed dialogue about the most important scientific, military and environmental issues facing us today.

“Thousands of deaths from radiation in the local population were caused by the American test explosions. The photographs, however, are unconsciously beautiful. Ranging from the aerial photograph of 18-ton ‘Little Feller’ which resembles an Indian camp in the desert sand, to ‘Bravo’ with its magnificent 15 mega-tons, they are occasionally even kitschy: Romeo on a South-sea island at sunset.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich)

"Many images are chillingly similar, yet each has its own unique beauty. (…) While the '100 SUNS' exhibition does show what we can do – in a horrifyingly beautiful melding of art and history, politics and science – we hope it also shows what we'll never do again." (San Francisco Weekly)

“An aesthetic point of view is rapidly achieved, and it is also longer-lasting. Those who want to, can take into account the idea of the sublime. Those who want to, can also still be glad that we have been spared the sight of the real thing in connection with the East-West conflict. The thing that we really have to make an effort with just in order to cope, is how the height of human brutality can culminate in the heights of such beauty.” (tageszeitung, Berlin)

> '100 SUNS' was published in October 2003 in American, British, German, French, Italian and Swedish editions.

  >> germ.
>> images

   /exhibitions