Culture Now: Brian Eno

English artist, musician and composer Brian Eno discusses his visual art work with writer and novelist Michael Bracewell. Marking the occasion of a new exhibition of lightbox works (Brian Eno: Light Music, Paul Stolper, London, 29 April – 28 May) the pair explore the themes that inform and inspire Eno’s particular vision of light and time manipulation.

Eno’s new exhibition comprises an installation of six light pieces which seamlessly phase through an infinite combination of seductive self-generated ‘colourscapes’ using a series of interwoven LED lights, each accompanied by a unique musical composition. Each is a work that appears to extend temporal boundaries, presenting no seeming beginning or end, no finality.

Brian Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music and generative painting. As a visual artist he has been exhibiting since the late 1970s and has been showing his work regularly since, from Tokyo to Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro to New York, London to Madrid. His work is dedicated almost exclusively to the possibilities that the medium of light provides. In 2009, Eno was given the very rare invitation to exhibit on the iconic sails of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. This was achieved using an array of powerful projectors with the light thrown across Circular Quay. The installation consisted by Eno’s own software 77 Million Paintings, a piece that creates an ever-changing, albeit at an almost imperceptible speed, light painting.

Michael Bracewell is the author of six novels and three works of non-fiction, including Perfect Tense (2000) and England Is Mine (1997). He writes widely on modern and contemporary art, and his recent publications include Richard Hamilton: Late Works (National Gallery, London, 2012), Damien Hirst, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever (Sotheby's, London 2008) Bridget Riley; Paintings and Related Work(National Gallery, London, 2011), and Gilbert & George: The Complete Postcard Art (2 vols) (Prestel, 2011). He was co-curator of The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art at Tate St Ives, UK (2009) and The Secret Public: Last Days of The British Underground 1978 -1988 (Kunstverein Munich/ICA London 2007). He is a regular contributor to Frieze and The Burlington. Michael Bracewell's selected writings on art, The Space Between, edited by Doro Globus, was published by Ridinghouse, London in 2012.