Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to announce the reopening of Charles Ross: Light and Fire, which was interrupted during its first week due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now on display until November 13, it is the gallery’s first solo exhibition of works by the renowned New York and New Mexico-based artist.

Charles Ross (b. 1937, Philadelphia, PA) was an undergraduate student studying mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, when he serendipitously enrolled in a sculpture class to fulfill a liberal arts requirement; this course opened up the potential contained within the visual rendering of mathematical concepts with which he was deeply engaged. This conceptual notion led Ross to pursue a graduate degree in sculpture, and has since guided his artistic practice.

Between 1963 and 1966 Ross mined his interest in spatial geometry, movement, and the inanimate object, collaborating with postmodern performance and dance icons Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, and Deborah Hay to create theatrical sets and develop choreography. Following a series of acclaimed performances, Ross refocused his practice to concern the medium and movement of light, soon beginning work on his seminal Prism series. A breakthrough in his artistic practice, these objects refract and distort light and image, and harness the intangibility of light to alter our perception of the everyday world. In the mid 1960s, Sol Lewitt encouraged Ross to approach Virginia Dwan, the vanguard dealer of Minimal art and Earthworks. Ross’ first exhibition at Dwan Gallery, comprising a group of Prism works, took place in 1968.

Ross began work on the Solar Burn series in 1971. Using a large lens to magnify and focus sunlight on meticulously prepared wooden panels, Ross explored the movement of the Sun by way of a burned trace resulting in what the artist describes as a “portrait of light”. The largest of the Solar Burns featured in Charles Ross: Light and Fire, titled 8 minutes, 19 seconds on, off, on, off…, pays homage to the amount of time it takes sunlight to reach the earth.

Like the Prisms, Ross’ Explosion Drawings convey the physicality of light through dispersal rather than concentration of energy. Ross created his first Explosion Drawings in 1982 alongside construction of Star Axis, his monumental Earthwork observatory on a mesa in New Mexico. Inspired by the use of dynamite in  Star Axis’ ongoing construction, as well as various mathematical computations and theories, Ross arranged live detonation cords and powdered pigments on dampened paper as a means to create drawings instantaneously; following detonation, traces of the explosion are visible as scorched lines, and the subsequent “fallout” of spectrum pigments absorb into the surface of the paper.