Light Phenomena is Kessler’s ongoing series of airbrushed paintings of the colors of the sky. Each gradient records a light phenomenon: the reds, oranges and violets produced when sunlight scatters off small particles suspended in the atmosphere — volcanic aerosols thrown up from the earth’s interior, or the fine dust and smoke of human burning. The palette that landscape painting and consumer culture have used for two centuries to sell a consumable idea of nature becomes, read this way, an index of what hangs in the air: geology on one side, the Pyrocene on the other.
The project began in 2015 with the Marble Works: sky gradients airbrushed onto slabs of marble, setting the brief time of light against the geological time of the stone and against marble’s long history as a material of art. It continued with Objects of Unbelonging, where the same gradient moves onto fossils, corals and minerals.
After the marble and the objects, the series moved to alu-dibond sheets sprayed with the exact color gradients of specific storms, sunsets, and skies Kessler witnessed and photographed — Ifen and Devils Thumbs Ranch (both 2018, New York), Storm over Catskill Mountains, New York (2021), Gradient Venice, 9/20/17 7:36 PM (2021), and Helengert-Allgäu (2022, 111 × 171 cm). As Kessler frames it, these panels historicize fleeting atmospheric moments — tied to personal memory but standing in for “the universal time of light” — using the same mechanically-produced gradient language as the object works, now applied directly as paint rather than airbrushed onto found geology. The panels were shown at the Austrian Cultural Forum (London) in 2022 alongside the coral and mineral sculptures of Objects of Unbelonging, which carry the same airbrushed gradient onto fossils and stone.
The gradient-on-painting logic sharpened further in 2024–26: rather than airbrushing an original witnessed sky, Kessler began airbrushing gradients directly onto reproductions of specific historical paintings — Turner’s Seascape with a Yacht (2024), then a 2025–26 Artboard Edition built around Caspar David Friedrich (Sea Beach in the Fog, Winter Landscape, Greifswald in Moonlight, Winter Landscape with Church) and Edgar Degas (Racehorses in a Landscape), each in small editions on art board. This makes the project’s core argument explicit rather than implicit: the gradient is lifted straight off the same 19th-century landscape tradition (Friedrich, Turner) that the whole Light Phenomena project has been arguing against all along, folding Dr. Christos Zerefos’s research on historical sky-color and air pollution directly into the work.
A selection was shown as Wasted Sunsets at Galerie Heike Strelow, Frankfurt, in 2023, and at Bildraum Bregenz in 2024. The accompanying book, The Year Without a Summer (Distanz Verlag, 2025), includes a text by Christos Zerefos.
Works
In this project
Installation views
Disasters of Climate Change (laser-burned prints), installation view, Forever and Sunsmell, Galerie Heike Strelow, Frankfurt, 2019.
