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Nicolas Schöffer
"Lux-XI", Parisian Luminodynamic High Mirrored Stainless Steel Sculpture

1960

About the Item

"Lux-XI" is an abstract and kinetic sculpture constructed out of mirrored finished stainless steel by the French-Hungarian artist Nicolas Schöffer. This is number 11 in a series of sculptures Schöffer built in the 1960s to apply what he called luminodynamism to his work. The Lux sculptures would be placed on a rotating motorized base, allowing those who viewed the sculpture to experience a kinetic art that reflected and folded the lights and shadows that would play upon it. This is the larger version of Schöffer's Lux-XI. Born in Kalocsa, Hungary, Nicolas Schöffer graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Budapest and later enrolled at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, France in 1936 where he lived and worked until his death in 1992. Through the 1930s and 1940s he was influenced by and experimented with Cubo-Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism until he began to explore spatio-dynamics in 1948. He was the first artist to employ cybernetic principles in art with his 1956 piece CYSP 1, becoming one of the early pioneers of cybernetic art which sought to emphasize feedback and interactivity over aesthetics and material. Cybernetics, while often understand as the merging of biology and technology, is a transdisciplinary approach that seeks to understand feedback and control within all systems technological and biological. By 1957 he would begin integrating light and multimedia sources into his work under the principles of luminodynamism, influencing his early Lux series. 1959 would see him incorporate time as an element too under the principles of chronodynamics. These would converge into the cybernetic principles of his art and its self-communication with the individual observer, his psyche, and his environment. Schöffer would continue to apply these interconnected and three-dimensional feedback experiences into his art for the rest of his life, creating sculptures, mobiles, and even carpets that expressed these cybernetic concepts. His work was displayed throughout his life in Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Decorative Art in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Arts of Rome, the Oxford University Museum, and the Nicolas Schöffer Museum which was devoted to his art in his birthplace of Kalocsa, Hungary. Since his death in 1992 his work has been found in the Guggenheim, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Smithsonian. In 2018 the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art (LaM) in France ran a retrospective on his career Schöffer's exploration of space dynamism and the integration of the observer into experience continue to challenge boundaries and dimensions in the interconnected and technological society and ask the hard questions of what it means to observe light, motion, and ourselves within it.
  • Creator:
    Nicolas Schöffer
  • Creation Year:
    1960
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 23.5 in (59.69 cm)Width: 28.5 in (72.39 cm)Depth: 23.5 in (59.69 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
    Very good to extremely good condition, no tarnishing, high mirrored quality, all screws tight, a fantastic piece.
  • Gallery Location:
    Detroit, MI
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU128616782792

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