Literature

Public acquisitions: The Mayor Gallery has placed his works to Tate Britain, London, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, and Voorlinden Museum (Double Arc, Rainbow, 1964)

In November 1965, Billy Apple staged his second solo exhibition at Bianchini Gallery in New York City. This ground-breaking exhibition is credited with being one of the first to treat electric light as a new sculptural medium, a move that was then beginning to galvanise a range of artists working in the USA and Europe. Taking the rainbow as its central motif, this show proved Apple’s attraction to new products and advancing technologies, and his fascination for the science of colour and light.

The exhibition featured seven neon sculptures variously based on the rainbow shape and colours. These were placed strategically across the gallery floor to recreate the hues of the visible spectrum with a precision that together made up white light. Along with these floor-based works, Apple included an editioned Rainbow multiple (serigraphs utilising arcs of brilliant fluorescent inks), and five free-standing Plexiglas rainbows, some mounted on acrylic waterfalls, neatly scaled to sit on plinths or shelves that toyed with coloured rainbow light as if it could exist in solid and liquid states.

Billy Apple’s Rainbows were described by Robert Pincus-Witten, writing in Artforum in February 1966, as “among the most beautiful that hover over the present scene”. They were subsequently included in several exhibitions designed to survey the new medium. These include: Art Turned On (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1965), Art Electric, Ileana Sonnabend Gallery, Paris, 1966), and Kunst-Licht-Kunst (curated by Frank Popper for Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1966).