Thomas Wilfred

With his light compositions, Thomas Wilfred “is explicitly making reference to the experience of traveling through space-time, which is to his mind analogous to viewing a Lumia composition. One is meant to imagine being immersed in this field of moving light in the cosmos and the screen is like the window of a spaceship looking out onto deep space.” [Keely Orgeman]

With his lumia instruments that created compositions from electrical, mechanical and reflective elements, the American light artist Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) created a new art form at the crossroads between technology and modern art. The light paintings he composed – meditative, northern lights-like colour symphonies –, and which he presented quietly without musical accompaniment, earned him a place in the Museum of Modern Art, New York as part of the exhibition “15 Americans” in 1952 together with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.