Luftwerk: The Sun Standing Still Exhibition Catalogue

The Sun Standing Still

December 12, 2025 - February 28, 2026

Introduction by Britton Bertran

“I Perceive Therefore I Am” essay by Giovanni Aloi

Introduction by Britton Bertran

On the occasion of their first solo exhibition, The Sun Standing Still, opening December 12, SECRIST | BEACH is pleased to announce representation of Luftwerk, an artistic duo of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. This exhibition features a suite of new sculptures, wall reliefs, and a site-specific installation by Luftwerk and investigates the dynamic interplay between sunlight and the Earth’s revolution This exhibition is presented concurrently with Luminous Matter, an invitational survey co-organized with Luftwerk and featuring 7 artists In addition, the gallery’s salon space features a double channel video installation titled 当⽇之东 遇⻅夜之西 / when the East of the day meets the West of the night, by time-based artist Yuge Zhou.

The time before and after daylight, when everything appears muted yet quietly spectacular, reveals a distinct and transitory palette. Capturing the fleeting and subjective perception of light and atmosphere, the works on view in The Sun Standing Still explore how color, devoid of literal representation, can evoke emotional and sensory responses Fittingly, the exhibition dates include December 21, better known as the Winter Solstice, or the first day of winter This is the day when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted farthest from the sun, resulting in the shortest period of daylight and the longest night of the year Beyond it’s astronomical importance, this day also marks the culturally symbolic rebirth of the sun: a renewal imbued with hope, resilience, and the cyclical rhythm of time.

Expanding upon their ongoing investigations into the relationship between perception, space, and light, Luftwerk draws conceptual parallels to Claude Monet’s 1872 painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), the work that gave name to Impressionism Just as Monet sought to capture the immediacy of light, Luftwerk transforms that fleeting energy into sculptural and immersive forms, translating light itself into color and vibration

The exhibition features a range of sculptural objects and a large-scale installation that together create a harmonious, meditative environment. With a focus on heightened perception, color, light, and form become the primary materials shaping an experience that unfolds through the viewer’s movement. This reciprocal interaction light cast as color onto form reveals a complex dialogue between energy and perception. Filtered through the celestial rhythm of the sun ’ s path, Luftwerk’s phenomenological approach opens a space for reflection, renewal, and tangible meaning

“I Perceive Therefore I Am” by Giovanni Aloi

I Perceive Therefore I Am

Giovanni Aloi

This morning there was light. Tomorrow morning there will be light. But where is light?

Etel Adnan

Twilight is the reverberation of notes that lingers between the lines of a music staff; it is a drift of consciousness toward the limits of the representable

There’s a kind of light that does not simply reveal the world but loosens it, making certainty crumble It is the light of thresholds: the handful of minutes before sunlight fully bathes the day, and the slow unthreading of form brought on by its departure as night falls In those brief intervals of rapid transition, color is no longer obedient: it spills into the atmosphere in vaporous shades, deeply relational and oddly intimate It is no longer something that belongs to an artist’s palette; nor can it ever be fully possessed by the eye Instead, it becomes a bridge between bodies and moods, breaching boundaries while endlessly slipping out of reach at the edges of our field of vision, relentlessly dissipating

Less an arrangement of discrete objects than a cohesive environment calibrated to subtle shifts of perception, Luftwerk’s The Sun Standing Still revels in this liminal dimension as it stages chromatic lingering that unfolds through duration, movement, and perspective The exhibition asks the viewer to do something deceptively simple: to walk, to turn, to re-approach, to look again and again, and to focus In doing so, it instills a fundamental awareness: what you see is inseparable from where you stand in space, an optical phenomenon that swiftly turns into a philosophical question

At its core, The Sun Standing Still is a deeply existential endeavor Across the galleries, colors obstinately refuse to settle into a single, true, objective state Everything refracts, engulfed in relational flux Gradients bloom and retreat Pigment and light flicker into subtle dialectics Forms that at first appear fixed are endlessly remodeled by the visitor’s motion and the ambient light’s slow drift The result is a somber meditation on the instability of being alive: the acknowledgement that reality does not exist as a reassuringly self-contained object, but unravels as a subjective phenomenon – always in the process of fading just as it seems at its most graspable – swallowed by the incessant flow of time

The title is where the exhibition’s existential stakes first take hold The constant, subtle flux of light and color is offset by suspension: The Sun Standing Still A cosmic pause, a biblical miracle of arrested time? The phrase also names the solstice: the moment when the sun appears to hesitate at the edge of its arc before reversing course That brief standstill, more perceived than real, has long been read as a hinge in time, a threshold where darkness stops accumulating and light begins to reclaim its domain

Wrapped into this notion of “solar stillness” are older histories of perceptual fallacy; the kind that cost Copernicus and Galileo dearly In truth, the sun is always still That claim of stillness therefore opens onto a paradox, and with it a cautionary tale: to challenge what we collectively take for truth is to unsettle the ground beneath us This destabilization can be both threatening and exhilarating: an opportunity to question one ’ s own beliefs, or a reason to retreat into the blinkered comfort of what already feels certain

Color as Event

We tend to treat color as a property We speak as if it belongs to objects the way weight or texture does: as if it were anchored in material and therefore objective and dependable Luftwerk patiently undo that assumption Their works insist that color is not simply there, but unfolds in the simplest and most surprising of ways It is forged by distance and angle, by the porosity of surfaces, and by the readiness of the eye Color is not a thing but an event: one that unravels between the world and the perceiver

This is why the exhibition’s chromatic instability exceeds the parameters of a purely aesthetic proposition From a genealogical perspective, Luftwerk’s endeavor is closely related to the histories of 1950s Color Field painting and the 1960s experimentations with light and color of James Turrell and Dan Flavin But The Sun Standing Still reaches deeper into a more intimate and urgent sphere of concern It points to the uneasy truth that to see is not to receive reality, but to have no choice but to participate in its formation To see is to be implicated The self enters the world at the level of color not as a passive spectator but as a co-author of reality at its most elemental You cannot stand outside the phenomenon, because you are an indissoluble part of it It is not the wonder of color per se that Luftwerk bring into view, but the condition of seeing, and with it that of being

Color is a translation stitched through physiology and memory, through desire and trust Even among humans, perception varies; across species, the spectrum expands to radical plurality Luftwerk’s environment, with its insistence on refraction, reflection, filtering, and chromatic slippage, is a reminder that the world is never simply given: it is continuously rendered through relationalities It exists in the mind as much as “out there,” in a dimension we can never know in its fullness even as we go on believing we see it clearly and wholly

Where does reality reside? In the object? In the light that strikes it? In the surface that receives and reemits it? Or in the relationships between object and beholder who, by moving through space, continually reconstitutes the visible, recrafting reality with every step? And, perhaps more importantly, how can this inquiry shed light on our contemporary moment and the altered states of perception that construct everyday life through ubiquitous screens and other mediatic interfaces?

The Primacy of Perception 3

It is particularly meaningful that Luftwerk have grounded their exploration of color in two pivotal works in the history of painting and architecture One is Monet’s pioneering Impression, soleil levant (1872), which catalyzed the Impressionist revolution From this work they have painstakingly sampled the color palette for the exhibition

Claude Monet

Impression, soleil levant, 1872 Oil on canvas, 48 cm x 63 cm

The other is Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel (1950), which broke with the hard rationalism of strict Modernist geometry, pioneering a nuanced and expressive use of colored light From this work, they have extracted the power light has to redefine space

photo

Both works, made nearly a century apart, are marked by an uncontainable desire to dissolve: the refraction of light and color through Monet’s broken brushwork, crashing reality into perceptual splintering, and Le Corbusier’s chapel, infringing the austere solidity of concrete through the nuanced force of light Both are radical, perceptual ruptures: color experiments that depart from linear certainties, propositions that radically changed the history of art.

Together, these works re-stage the world as perpetual becoming: uncontainable, enmeshed. Monet and Le Corbusier show that the act of creativity, in the precarious fragility of the modern world, entails an analysis of the shifting relationships that link light, atmosphere, surface, and eye.

In essence, this is what the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty theorized as the flesh of the world: a contact, a reciprocity, a crossing in which the seer is also, inevitably, visible, caught in the same medium as what is seen. Merleau-Ponty’s “I perceive, therefore I am ” replaces Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum ” (“I think therefore I am”): the illusory, self-contained modern subject gives way to an existentially embodied conception of experience grounded in the primacy of perception 5 6 7 4

Luftwerk’s The Sun Standing Still gives this idea a lucid, chromatic form. Across the Aurae and Solargraph series, color diffracts between the interval between painted surface, white wall, ambient light, and the

Aurae Duo No 4, 2025

moving body. What appears is never fully “in” the work, nor fully “in” the eye, but in that shared, impalpable, liminal atmosphere where light becomes experience. The insistence of works like Color Space 1, 2, and 3 on slow insistence on refraction and drift makes palpable Merleau-Ponty’s claim that reality is something we co-author with the world and that this co-authoring, at once intimate and uncertain, is the very condition of wonder.

By selecting Monet and Le Corbusier as conceptual cornerstones, Luftwerk further complicate this premise, reminding us that abstraction, in its strongest historical forms, has never been simply the

refusal of representation but a discipline of philosophical attention and attunement Abstraction is not a move away from reality but a move closer to the truth of how we construct reality This is particularly evident in work the twin sculptures Aperture of Twilight, which propose that abstraction is a means of approaching experience at its most elemental and unstable Here the gallery becomes a site where modalities of attention must be rebuilt from the ground up, with no narrative scaffolding to guide them In that sense, abstraction here functions as a refusal to distract with rhetoric and ideologies, a refusal to reassure, and an invitation to linger in the presence of what is incessantly fleeting

Reflection and Refraction

Refraction is not an object; it is an event produced by passage through differing conditions. It is inherently transient, inherently contingent. Unlike painted pigment, which promises permanence, refraction is always on the verge of morphing because it depends on a choreography of circumstances. In this exhibition, color frequently spills where it is not “supposed” to be. Traditionally contained by the frame, here it slides from one plane to another, contaminates whites, pools in crevices, and emanates halos within and around emptiness. The white walls of the gallery space, typically a neutral background for art, become inextricably implicated. This is refraction’s philosophical proposition.

George Seurat, the father of pointillism, the movement that, in many ways, exacerbated Impressionism’s obsession with optical science, was keenly aware that the color of a surrounding wall can “bleed” into a painting and upset its intended chromatic balance So persistent was his concern that, a few years after A Sunday on La Grande Jatte was first shown in 1886, he re-stretched the canvas to add a dotted border: a

kind of “pointillist buffer” tuned to the complementary colors already at work within the scene, so the painting could be sheltered from the chromatic intrusions of the outside world At the time, wallpapers could be intensely colored: deep green, burgundy, dark blue, mustard yellow, rich red-brown

Luftwerk reject Seurat’s chromo-anxiety For them, the wall is neither the pure and transcendental backdrop of modernist idealizations nor a threat to harmony, but an open field of potentiality Their chromatic events are designed to spill and refract onto one another and onto adjacent surfaces,

allowing color to become an atmosphere that cannot be contained by a frame because it is born precisely in the exchange between object, architecture, and the moving viewer This was ultimately one of the most important lessons the Impressionists imparted: color is relational, shaped by light and by the reflections it casts from one surface to another They painted quickly to catch these fleeting nuances that classical art mostly overlooked

Toward the Margins: Fleetingness as a Form of Knowledge

Twilight is a margin in time

Refraction is a margin in matter

The glow that appears in surrounding space is a margin in form

Luftwerk ask us to treat margins not as secondary but as sites of true revelation This is a radical gesture, suggesting that what is most meaningful is often what is least easily claimed, classified, and theorized and that the insistence on certainty can become a form of contrivance not only toward others, but toward experience itself To remain with the shifting, to look between, to accept the world’s refusal to become a stable image, is to cultivate a different relationship to reality: one based on attention, patience, curiosity, and humility.

Perhaps this is the exhibition’s most enduring offering. Not simply a thesis on light, color, and vision, as it might at first seem, but a practice of seeing and being in the world: one that accepts that nothing stays the same, even when it appears to and that nothing fully is what it seems, even when one is almost certain. The works hold their forms, yet their appearances continuously drift. A color that at first seems authoritative reveals itself as contingent. A gradient that promises clarity dissolves into ambiguity. The pleasure is real, but so is the unease, and it is precisely this coupling that makes the experience feel existentially true.

In the end, The Sun Standing Still casts light as a condition that generates a subtle kind of alternative, foundational knowledge It teaches that perception is not possession but encounter It shows that the essence of reality is not to be found in the fictional fixity of fact, but in the near-impalpable refractions of its aftermath And it suggests, with poised insistence, that the most profound forms of wonder are those that do not resolve into answers, but deepen the question

This morning there was light Tomorrow morning there will be light But where is light?

Adnan, Etel Night, Nightboat Books, 2016, p 37 1

2 Timberlake, Todd, and Paul Wallace Finding Our Place in the Solar System Cambridge University Press, 2019 Mathieu, Marianne, Dominique Lobstein, Anne-Marie Bergeret-Gourbin, Christian Chatellier, Géraldine Lefebvre, Laurent Manoeuvre, Donald W Olson, and Musée Marmottan Monet’s Impression Sunrise: The Biography of a Painting Paris: Hazan, 2014

4 Danièle Pauly, Le Corbusier, and Fondation Le Corbusier LeCorbusier: La Chapelle de Ronchamp, the Chapel at Ronchamp Basel; Boston; Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1997

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice The Visible and the Invisible Edited by Claude Lefort Translated by Alphonso Lingis Evanston, Ill Northwestern University Press, 1968.

6 Merleau-Ponty never overtly used this phrase This is the author’s summarization of his philosophy as it stands in opposition to Renee Descartes famous motto “Cogito ergo sum ” that anchors the fictitious idea that an autonomous and self-contained self can exist.

René Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy Newcomb Livraria Press, 1951

8 Herbert, Robert L, Neil Harris, Georges Seurat, and Art Institute Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago in Association with The University Of California Press, 2004

Horizons

When Claude Monet painted Impression, soleil levant, not only was it formative for the Impressionism movement, but also offered up the eponymous title for the revolutionary move into capturing evolving light, color, and emotion in the field of painting This painting offers Luftwerk a color palette to carry through The Sun Standing Still The Aurae series uses these atmospheric hues in abstract rings that echo Monet’s burning sun

With changing ensembles, Luftwerk’s Aurae draw on the color palettes of dawn and dusk, with saturated colors painted on the underside of concentric spun aluminum rings. Through the reflection and emission of color on the front surfaces of the rings, a subtle glow emanates within the negative space.

Aurae Trio No 1, 2025 Aluminum and acrylic paint 26 375 inch diameter, 3 inch depth

Color Spaces

With intersecting planes of tinted glass, Luftwerk’s Color Space sculptures project a multitude of color overlaps and mixes A subtle tension between understanding and chance pervade the objects Light and space become concurrent variables, calibrated to one another, in the static object Though the cubes are diagrammatic in essence, there is an air of the indescribable as one ’ s positioning transforms the piece with every movement. Perception as a subjective experience often overrides our understanding of the mechanics of color, light, and space in the most beautiful way, and at their core, the three Color Space pieces express this sublimation to experience.

Space No 1, 2025

Glass with film

13 x 13 x 13 inches

Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Color Space No. 3, 2025

Glass with film

13 x 13 x 13 inches

Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Color Space No 3, 2025

Glass with film

13 x 13 x 13 inches

Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Luftwerk’s Solargraph series utilizes two sides of flat bars mounted perpendicular to the wall. On one side, saturated color diffuses onto the subsequent bar’s white surface. Each bar contains two colors in segments, and the heights of the boundaries vary from slat to slat, generating waves in aggregate The curves are inspired by the smooth sinusoidal waves which trace how daylight gradually lengthens and shortens through the seasons

As the visitor moves through the space, there is a dynamic interplay of exposure and concealment in the dimensional qualities of each work; one ’ s location critically reveals (beautiful) fallacies in our visual perception.

Solargraph: Shortest Day, 2025

Aluminum and acrylic paint

24 piececs

24 x 57 25 x 2 inches

Apertures of Twilight

In Apertures of Twilight, the two sculptures each evoke the gradients of dawn and dusk, but in a modular, almost expository, manner. The square motif’s opening becomes smaller into the depth of the work, a feeling of progressing into the exploration of the magic of these moments in the day’s light cycle Josef Albers, an inspiration to Bachmaier and Gallero, is an artist working in color theory and oft utilizes a square motif to explore visual properties of color and space

Aperture of Twilight: Dawn, 2025

Aluminum and acrylic paint

5 layers, 33 x 33 inches each

8 inch separation between layers

33 x 33 x 74 inches with framework

Aperture of Twilight: Dusk, 2025

Aluminum and acrylic paint

5 layers, 33 x 33 inches each

8 inch separation between layers

33 x 33 x 74 inches with framework

The Open Frame installation of 26 paintings is inspired by architect and designer Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel. The paintings in Luftwerk’s installation utilize one-point perspectives, simplified geometric shapes, and an interplay of fluorescent and acrylic paint in the compositions to evoke the light dispersed through Ronchamp’s stained glass windows

Luftwerk’s choice of title derives from the Italian phrase “finestra aperta Alberti,” translated to “Alberti’s open window” Leon Batista Alberti founded the concept of linear perspective during the Italian Renaissance, advocating that a painting’s frame should function as an open window: one should see, in a painting, a three-dimensional world For the world of art and art theory, this discovery probed the illusion of deep, rational, and consistent space on a two-dimensional surface Luftwerk’s installation thus fuses Le Corbusier’s evocative windows with Alberti’s influence on composition, space, and illusion as they continue to be explored through abstraction.

Throughout the day, Open Frame responds to the arc of natural light that washes down from the central skylight. At dusk, ultraviolet lighting activates the fluorescent paint in each Open Frame, transforming the installation with an otherworldly glow.

Each of the following works in the series of 26 was photographed during daylight, at dusk, and in the evening to capture the dynamic paintings in their many iterations

Open Frame 6, Perspective No 1, 2025

acrylic and fluorescent paint 24 x 36 inches

Open Frame 4, Perspective No 1, 2025

acrylic and fluorescent paint 24 x 24 inches

Open Frame 4, Perspective No. 2, 2025

Aluminum, acrylic and fluorescent paint

24 x 24 inches

Open Frame 6, Perspective No. 2, 2025

Aluminum, acrylic and fluorescent paint

24 x 36 inches

12 x 24 inches

Open Frame 3, Perspective No 2, 2025 Aluminum, acrylic and fluorescent paint 36 x 12 inches

Frame 2, Perspective No 4, 2025

About the Artists

Luftwerk, the Chicago-based artistic duo of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, develops spatial experiences mined from the creative possibilities of nature, data, and the built environment Their installations, site-specific interventions, and artwork create a tangible exploratory experience, swathed in the simplicity of light, color, and shape Each project of the duo builds and expands the body of work the relationships between material and context that inform the experience of space, architecture, and landscape The work is at once beautifully reflective of its site and also part of a greater understanding at the core of Luftwerk’s practice

Luftwerk states, "what fascinates us is the combination of color and light, to expand our understanding of color. Our interest in spatial compositions takes this phenomenon of color and light interactions into a realm where perspectives seem to shift and a space transforms into an immersive canvas, inviting a viewer to breathe, look, and experience."

Bachmaier and Gallero met in the Performance Art department at The School of the Art Institute in 1999, finding they had a shared interest in light, color, and technology. After many collaborative projects, in 2007, they formally established Luftwerk. Initially focused on temporary interventions using projected video to engage with architectural landmarks, the duo's current work centers on light and color as both material and concept

Luftwerk participated in the 2024 survey exhibition MANIFEST alongside solo exhibition Anne Lindberg: Of all colors with a light installation in the Secrist | Beach salon Their debut solo exhibition with the gallery, The Sun Standing Still, translates their immersive projects into individual objects for presentation

Installations and artwork by Luftwerk have been exhibited broadly at institutions including: Driehaus Museum, Chicago, IL; Illinois Institute of Technology (Mies van der Rohe Society), Chicago, IL; Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University, Alfred, NY; Cheekwood Estate & Gardens, Nashville, TN; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich; Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL and Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, IL Throughout their practice, Luftwerk has develop a robust portfolio of projects that engage with notable modern and contemporary architecture including: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago, IL by Gehry Partners; Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona and Farnsworth House, Plano, IL by Mies van der Rohe; Ford Residence, Aurora, IL by Bruce Goff; Millennium Park, Chicago, IL by SOM; Fallingwater, Mill Run, PA and Robie House, Chicago, IL by Frank Lloyd Wright; and Netsch Residence, Chicago, IL by Walter Netsch The artists have realized numerous large-scale permanent public and private commissions in Atlanta, Calgary, Charlotte, Chicago, Harare, Tampa, and Kansas City They have received numerous awards, including project awards from the AIA Chicago, Graham Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council Their work is in several public and private collections including the Public Art collections of Chicago and Fulton County, Museum Buchheim, USF Institute for Research in Art Their work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Hyperallergic, Time Magazine, The New Yorker

About the Essayist

Giovanni Aloi’s research focuses on the Anthropocene and new conceptions of nature in art. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Aloi is the author of Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019), Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020), Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art (edited with Michael Marder, 2023), Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking (2023), Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art (2025), Lawn (2025), and I'm Not an Artist: Reclaiming Creativity in the Age of Infinite Content (2025) He has contributed to PBS TV and BBC radio programs and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series 'Art after Nature'

Selections from the Artist’s Library

Adnan, Etel. Night. Nightboat Books, 2022.

Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. 1963.

Alberti, Leon Battista, and Martin Kemp. On Painting. Penguin, 1991.

Crippa, Maria Antoinetta, and Francoise Causse. Le Corbusier: The Chapel of Notre Dame Du Haut at Ronchamp. Abrams, 2014.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von Theory of Colours Translated by Charles Lock Eastlake, Dover Publications, Inc, 2006

Kalitina, Nina The Ultimate Book on Claude Monet Parkstone International, 2019

Munari, Bruno Bruno Munari: Square, Circle, Triangle Princeton University Press, 2016

Newton, Isaac, et al. Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light. Dover Publications, Inc, 2015.

Pastoureau, Michel, and Jody Gladding. Yellow: The History of a Color. Princeton University Press, 2023.

Philipp, Michael, et al. The Sun: Source of Light in Art. Prestel, 2023.

Rushdie, Salman. The Wizard of Oz. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Sullivan, Martin R Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism: International Experiments in Italy Routledge, 2021

Syme, Patrick Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours 2020

Vanderpoel, Emily Noyes Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color Legare Street Press, 2022.

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