CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/30/2022

Luminous 'Helen Pashgian: Spheres & Lenses' is new from Radius Books

"My work is about the ephemeral," Helen Pashgian wrote in 1988: "the way a mere 'edge' of light defines an existing image; the way light-defined images float and merge and create spatial dimension; the way the spacial dimensions suggest the deep, the ominous, the unknowable." Featured spreads are from Spheres & Lenses, the luminous new release from Radius Books. This deluxe, 172-page, 10x14-inch hardcover is, remarkably, the first comprehensive monograph on the Light and Space artist, whom essayist John Yau compares to Donald Judd. "The final link with Judd—and this is what I think places Pashgian’s work in a world all its own—is that it is neither painting nor sculpture. Her orbs of pale, floating color are mysterious and touch upon something basic to our lives, the need to grasp light as an object. Judd was a brilliant materialist interested in dematerializing the object, and revealing its impermanence. Interested in the presence of light, and all it evokes, Pashgian is wonderfully inexplicable."