Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and the Kramlich Art Foundation announce Anthony McCall: First Light, the San Francisco Bay Area premiere of the pioneering British artist’s revolutionary “solid light” works from the early 1970s. The exhibition features three seminal pieces that transformed the possibilities of cinema and challenged the boundaries between film, sculpture, drawing, and performance.
The exhibition presents Line Describing a Cone (1973), Conical Solid (1974), and Cone of Variable Volume (1974), works that invite viewers to step away from the screen and into the sculptural beams of projected light themselves. As theatrical haze catches the projector’s light, evolving geometric forms materialize in three-dimensional space, creating elegant structures that viewers can walk through, touch, and interact with. Over the course of their 30-minute durations, these works transform spectators into participants and galleries into playing fields, making space for both contemplation and action.
The works begin as film animations. In Line Describing a Cone, the longest piece of the show at 30 minutes, a single white point extends into a slowly curving line, building to a full circle across its running time. The 10-minute Conical Solid (1974) projects a flat blade of light that rotates from a fixed central axis at varying speeds. The Cone of Variable Volume shifts the size of a complete circle across four movements, one of which, McCall notes, builds “so that it resembles a very slow breathing.”
McCall developed these works after relocating from London to New York City in 1973, seeking to create what he described as a “film that could exist only in the moment of projection with an audience, without reference to an ‘elsewhere.’” The solid light works emerged at the intersection of avant-garde cinema, Minimalism, and Structural Film, while also anticipating parallel movements in expanded cinema, participatory performance, and today’s immersive video installations.
Anthony McCall: First Light continues a partnership initiated in 2015-16 with Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet, through an ongoing collaboration among the Kramlich Art Foundation and Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anthony McCall (b. St Paul’s Cray, UK, 1946) lives and works in Manhattan. His work’s historical importance has been recognized in major exhibitions including Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-77, Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-02); The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-04); Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-07); The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Projected Image, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008); and On Line, Museum of Modern Art (2010-11).
Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Tate Modern, UK (traveling to Oklahoma Contemporary, U.S., in March 2026); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Fubon Art Museum, Taiwan; Futura Seoul Museum, South Korea; The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; plus Pioneer Works, Sean Kelly Gallery, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Albright Knox Art Gallery), U.S.
About Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
FMCAC is a non-profit operating within a Historic Landmark District along the northern waterfront of San Francisco. FMCAC hosts a lively mix of arts, cultural, and educational programming in renovated military buildings repurposed as a cultural center.
Free Admission