On Thursday 25th May, internationally-acclaimed British sculptor Anthony James will be donating his monumental artwork 80″ Icosahedron - which recently appeared in Netflix's Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery starring Daniel Craig and Kate Hudson - as part of the amfAR 2023 auction in Cannes.
Hosted by Queen Latifa, amfAR's mission is to end the global AIDS epidemic through innovative research. amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, is one of the world's leading nonprofit organisations dedicated to the support of AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment education, and advocacy. Since 1985, amfAR has invested nearly $617 million in its programs and has awarded more than 3,500 grants to research teams worldwide.
With sculptures showcased worldwide from London to Dubai, Singapore to America, and even Antarctica, Anthony James has established himself as an internationally-acclaimed artist - making history as the first and only visual artist to exhibit on all seven continents when he installed one of his mesmerising stainless steel, glass, and LED Portals at White Desert's base camp in Antarctica near the South Pole.
Mirrors
One of the world's most sought-after contemporary artists, Anthony James is best known for his instagrammable large-scale LED sculptures comprising multifaceted mirrors, glass and hallucinogenic surfaces that light up each space they occupy. Exploring the cosmos and the concept of infinity, they transport onlookers into the future and beyond, forcing them to look deep inside the glass cases while interacting with the mirrored reflections and lights.
Just like gazing at the sky through the artist's telescope, deep inside the cases of harmony and symmetry, the straight lines often become curved before disappearing into black holes. The glass, steel, and LED structures bring a rigid and gleaming tangibility to the abstraction of the numerical calculation of flawless coherence.
Anthony James is no stranger to London's art scene with major public installations including a garden installation at the Royal Horticultural Society's annual Chelsea Flower Show in 2022, where he installed three light sculptures emulating natural crystal formations in tandem alongside 16 transmorphic colour sculptures at Saatchi Gallery that were connected to a central ethernet "brain" feeding algorithmic cues to the sculptures, mimicking the mycorrhizal networking of birch forests. In 2021, James engaged the facade of the Flannels flagship on London's Oxford Street with 33 million LEDs that wrapped the boutique's exterior inside three dozen digital canvases projecting films exploring the infinite interiors of the artist's Portal sculptures. He has also worked with the city of Westminster to install three monumental Light Field sculptures at Marble Arch in Hyde Park that drew more than 250,000 visitors in three months. Additionally, his work was showcased at both Masterpiece London in 2019 and Mayfair Sculpture Trail in 2020 and 2021.
Now more than ever public art projects occupy an important place in the society. Anthony James' art speaks to everyone: from neophytes to knowledgeable collectors. His fascinating light installations encapsulate a true sense of infinity and divine that unifies us all.
Anthony James comments: "It doesn't matter what your education level is, what language you speak, what culture you are brought up in, or where you are from, my work deals with a universal language based in sacred geometry. It's innate to everyone on the planet, so it's an honour to have my work on view in every continent. In my practice I'm trying to give a visual demonstration of the infinite or the divinity inside us all. If you're seeing and experiencing this ever-expanding cosmos, hopefully that's a window to explore this underlying law of nature, this inner light."
Sculptural
Anthony James (b. 1974) is a London-born, Los Angeles-based artist who graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design with a degree in painting. James is known for his monumental sculptures and installations that embrace Minimalism, transcendentalism and Light & Space. Anthony James's sculptural installations have been exhibited at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Berkeley Square (London) Art Basel (Switzerland) and The Armory Show (New York). He has works currently on public display in Aspen, Beverly Hills, Singapore, Dubai, London, and New York.
His work was recently featured in the major motion picture Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story and has been the subject of solo gallery exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery (London); Opera Gallery (New York, Dubai, London); Brand New Gallery (Milan), There-There and Patrick Painter, Inc. (Los Angeles) and notable group shows at Blum & Poe (Los Angeles), SHOWstudio (London), Gavlak (Palm Beach) and Thread Waxing Space (New York). His work has also been featured in The New York Times, CULTURED, Artnet, Vogue, Whitewall, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Wallpaper* and his Morphic Fields exhibition at Walter Storms Galerie (Munich) was the subject of a titular catalog published by Hatje Cantz.