“This summer, I intend to create a tornado-like kinetic sculpture, symbolising the disastrous changes that threaten to destroy what we love,” says Paul Friedlander about his plans to realise his first environmentally inspired piece and the challenges ahead. Paul is one of the stars of this year’s Vilnius Festival of Lights. He is a renowned British light artist and innovator whose work has captivated fans of light art around the globe for decades.
On 24-26 January at the Museum of Energy and Technology in Vilnius, Paul Friedlander, who combines science, art, and technology in his work, will present his famous kinetic light sculptures—a chromatic wave spectacle called the Hand of the Galaxy that balances between the real and the magical.
Paul Friedlander’s undulating sculptures are created by rapidly twisting a stretched rope in white light. The vibrating string becomes invisible, but the light reflected from the rope is visualized. The colours change and rotate, forming double spirals. The light dances and oscillates, creating spectrums of colour that turn science into performance art.
The main focus of the artist‘s work is a spectrum of colours created using special light sources, rotation, and ever-changing spatial forms. The dynamic sculptures, which appear to be breathing light, not only catch the eye and intrigue but also invite us to contemplate the essence of light and to look deeper into the nature of the universe.
Father of two and grandfather of five grandchildren, light artist Paul Friedlander is a unique personality. Trained first as a physicist and mathematician and then as a fine artist, he worked in the theatre as a lighting designer and set designer. But for the last few decades, without ever losing his love for science, he has been passionate about kinetic art.
His spectacular light sculptures are based on mathematical and physical principles such as chaos theory, wave dynamics, and quantum mechanics. Still, the works are not rigidly academic – they appeal on an emotional and aesthetic level.
“My work is a way to show the world how mysterious and magical light is. I want people to feel it as a living being,” says Paul Friedlander.
Friedlander’s relentless curiosity and desire to explore and understand the world’s mysteries are inspiring. The artist’s colourful biography reveals the roots of his outstanding artistic imagination and technical ingenuity.
His earliest childhood memory is of the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, which he learned about on TV news. Paul Friedlander was a child of the space age, a dreamer who was so fascinated by space that he spent his time building spacecraft and longed to travel alone to explore the universe.
“I was lucky to have loving parents who accepted my quirks, such as not throwing away broken toys and other things because I used them in my games. I was an instinctive constructivist and recycler,” says Mr Friedlander, who was constantly encouraged by his artist mum and dad, a mathematician at Cambridge University, to go to exhibitions and to develop his hobbies.
A visit to a kinetics exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1970 left a life-changing impression on the young man. He was most impressed by the works of the cybernetic artists Nicolas Schöffer (1912) and Wen-Ying Tsai (1928). Friedlander was also greatly influenced by his tutor, the physicist and quantum mechanics expert Sir Anthony Leggett, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work on superfluids.
Diving head and heart into kinetic art, the science-inspired artist began by patiently experimenting with small sculptures, which grew in size over the years as the design was refined technically. In 1983, during his creative process, he made an important discovery about the chaotic properties of the rotating string. He invented chromastrobic light, which changes colour faster than the eye can see.
Since 1998, Mr Friedlander has been exhibiting his unique light sculptures around the world in various art and science museums and festivals. He has also been invited to give lectures, mostly about his own creations and inventions.
The first version of the large-scale installation Hand of the Galaxy was shown at the 2014 Lumina Light Festival in Cascais, Portugal. We will have the opportunity to see it in Vilnius this year. Over the past decade, much improved, even more vibrant, and engaging work has been exhibited in more than 20 countries: Portugal, Bahrain, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, North Macedonia, Estonia, France, etc. In November 2024, the installation graced the opening of the Astronomy Discovery Centre at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona (USA). Also at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico (USA), the artist took part in an interdisciplinary meeting of physicists, mathematicians, neuroscientists, artists, and art historians, bringing together a wide range of experts in the field to address a long-standing challenge, as old as art itself: the representation of movement and the passage of time in static media.
From an early age, Mr Friedlander liked to follow unexplored paths and, as he puts it, “make waves.” He thinks we should constantly expand our understanding of what art is because some of the best works of art are on the verge of the unconscious. He also believes that art and science can serve each other and create new forms of knowledge and inspiration.
When asked what happiness means to him, the artist replies: “To keep doing what I’m doing, to keep making art, and to find new challenges to overcome.”
The upcoming Vilnius Light Festival, dedicated to the city’s birthday, is an opportunity to experience international works of light art. Paul Friedlander’s masterpieces, which are a beauty for the eyes and a thought-provoking dialogue with the audience, are sure to become one of the festival’s highlights from January 24 to 26.
