There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. These lines, from the Leonard Cohen song Anthem, seem to capture the ways in which being close to the light transforms both us and it: the way it comes through treetops in stray, fractured beams, the shadows it can cast along a wall. Our proximity to light transforms the space around us; what it feels both to look at, and to inhabit. In his Tate Modern exhibition Solid Light, Anthony McCall is able to take this feeling and turn it into something corporeal.



There are two sides to the works that make up Solid Light – the beams of light, and the black walls onto which shadows are cast. These shadows are at their most developed, most vivid, looking at the back side of the walls that McCall puts up around the gallery space, meaning that, if you’re standing away from the light, you’ll be able to see the impact that the presence of a human body can have on the surrounding space. The other side of this is the light itself, projected in a variety of shapes – a straight line, a zigzag, a circle – onto bare black walls. McCall invites us to go into the light.

The feeling is strange. While the light itself becomes all-consuming – it blocks out anything around it – it’s never blinding to look at. By being inside McCall beams of light, creating a sculpture between the body and the beam, the space itself transforms into pure brightness. Getting closer to the light, or first putting an errant hand or arm within it, is something that I approached tentative, uncertain; as if to step into the light would be to leave the room itself behind. This, in a way, is what happens – the light becomes the space, but it never feels solid; the edges of the beam like dust, something that the body can cut through.

In one part of the gallery is a wide beam, with a few cracks of light surrounding the reflective wall that it’s pointed at, illuminating it. I stand close to the source of the light, looking at my reflection in the mirror, pointing my phone camera at it. The light splits around my back, shooting light instead in beams shooting above my shoulders, and down below my hips. My presence transforms the space, and the light transforms my body.




But while McCall’s work offers a direct invitation to bring the viewer in, Germaine Kruip’s work in solo exhibition Real Time at The Approach gallery, offers a different relationship. Where McCall seems animated by the possibilities of the body, Kruip’s work is focused on drawing the attention of the eye, and asking it decode structures of light that are constantly transforming. And, in contrast to the black walls of McCall’s Solid Light, Real Time uses white walls. Each of these spaces offer something of a blank canvas: the black box of theatre, and the white walls of the gallery; each a space designed in tension with artifice and reality.

By presenting her work up against gallery walls, Kruip transforms them with lighting setups that feel inherently theatrical. In Ray (2025), a long beam of light flickers up against the wall, growing narrower and increasingly dark as time goes by; sometimes it fades away completely, before coming back to life. Looking at the stuttering transformations of Kruip’s work, it feels like the way light is shot through stained-glass windows, offering an uncertain possibility of salvation; or like the slashing mark of a dagger, cutting through fabric or a canvas. There’s something painterly in Kruip’s work, through the tension in which it seems to exist in a gallery space, and the way the shapes her lights form feel as if they could be right at home on a canvas.




This feels particularly true for Horizon (2025). As the name suggests, this presents a circle of light that gradually moves down, fading into darkness like a setting sun. But more than that, it strikes me as the ghost of an abstract expressionist painting; the way that the light gathers, brightest in the centre, feels like a Mark Rothko’s colour field. Here, Kruip seems to use light as a way to capture the ghost of a painting, something that changes, even decays, in – as the title of the exhibition tells us – real time.

Both Kruip and McCall works use the ability of light to transform space as a way of engaging with other artistic forms. McCall turns the human body, and the strange spaces of light it occupies in his immersive work, into a kind of collaborative sculpture. His is fluid and changing with the movements of limbs, whereas Kruip’s work, with constant, gradual alterations, challenges the eyes with a series of associations that never remain static for long.



At the centre of Real Time is the aptly named Focal Point, a light projected onto a wall in the second gallery of The Approach. Slowly but surely, the circle of light goes through something of a narrative arc – darkness coming in from around the edges, the shape and form of it somehow constantly in flux. There are times where it looks like a human eye, or an eclipsed sun, an optical illusion taking on 3-D form. Again, this suggests a space beyond the gallery itself where this light might continue to exist, as if Kruip is illuminating something that has been hidden in plain sight all along.

While McCall does something similar in this creation of otherworldly space, in Solid Light it isn’t the light that does the becoming, but us; both artists create spaces that at first glance seem like the barebones skeleton for performance and art, transforming both it and us by exposing the cracks in everything, and letting the light in.