Background
Douglas Wheeler was born in 1939 in Globe, Arizona, United States.
Douglas Wheeler was born in 1939 in Globe, Arizona, United States.
Douglas Wheeler attended the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in the early 1960s.
Wheeler began his career in the early 1960s as an abstract painter of white paintings subtly inflected with color. He first incorporated light as a medium in 1965 by attaching neon elements to his canvases — works that seem to glow with a self-contained inner light. Wheeler gradually abandoned paint as a medium to produce fabricated “light paintings” and “light encasements”, large, vacuum-formed Plexiglas squares edged inside with neon tubing. Installed in controlled environments — all-white rooms that have been modified and darkly lit — the light-rimmed forms appear to float in space. Wheeler’s first solo exhibition opened at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1968 and was followed by others.
With his "Light Walls", first exhibited in 1969, Wheeler expanded this concept to an architectural scale, transforming a room wall through the use of neon lights embedded within the floor, walls, and ceiling. And in the "Infinity Environments" that he inaugurated in 1975 an entire room is dematerialized; a visitor has the experience of entering a seemingly limitless white void, in which light itself assumes an almost palpable quality. Wheeler has also conceived installations that deploy acoustic elements in order to produce certain experiences. In "PSAD Synthetic Desert III", initially described in a 1968 drawing and first realized at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2017, a near-total suppression of sound contributes to an immersive environment that replicates the optical and acoustic sensation of distance in the Painted Desert in Arizona.
David Zwirner has represented the work of Doug Wheeler since 2011. He has had three solo exhibitions with the gallery, in 2012, 2014, and 2016.
His installations can be characterized by a singular experimentation with the perception and experience of space, volume, and light.
Quotes from others about the person
Wheeler’s primary aim as an artist is to reshape or change the spectator’s perception of the seen world. In short, his medium is not light or new materials or technology, but perception.