Edinburgh Art Festival 2008 exhibition

E-Cyclorama by Sanford Wurmfeld

• 24 July – 5 September
• Edinburgh College of Art, Main Building Sculpture Court
• 10am – 6pm daily

The E-Cyclorama is a painting, but it is not like any painting you ever saw.  It is painted on the inside of a huge cylinder. You enter from beneath and as you do, the painting surrounds you and fills your field of vision with a rainbow of shifting colour.  The colour moves through the spectrum, but the transitions are so subtle that you can never be sure where one colour ends and the next begins. The effect is dynamic, an experience almost more like music than painting, or it is surround-sound painting. You are completely immersed in colour.

The artist, Sanford Wurmfeld lives and works in New York. He has spent a year painting the E-Cyclorama. His first experiment with this format, called simply the Cyclorama 2000, generated great popular interest when it was shown Edinburgh in 2004. The new E-Cyclorama is quite different in shape and in colour key from the first version. The ‘E’ stands for elliptical and its plan is oval, 8 x 10 metres. The area of the painted surface is more than sixty square metres, or more than seven hundred square feet of painting. It took the artist a year to paint and is considerably larger than Bigger Trees that David Hockney recently presented to Tate Britain.

The oval shape of the E-Cyclorama is inspired by the oval plan of many Baroque churches. The effect is baroque too. Because of the oval, not only does the colour change constantly as your eye moves across the painted surface, its distance from you changes too, increasing the uncertainty of what you are seeing. The colour shifts from brilliant yellow at one end to deep violet at the other, passing through quieter intermediate colours in between. It provides a visual experience unlike any other. You cannot really appreciate how different it is from ordinary painting that you simply look at till you actually experience it --- till it surrounds you. Words are not enough.

The Cyclorama form the artist has used is coming home. It derives from the original Panorama, a painted public entertainment in this format invented by Robert Barker in Edinburgh in 1788. Barker’s first Panorama was a circular view of the city from the top of Calton Hill. The Panorama subsequently became hugely popular during the nineteenth century, prefiguring the cinema as visual entertainment.

The E-Cyclorama has not been seen anywhere before. The complex oval stretcher has been made in Edinburgh by Ben Dawson Furniture, while in New York the artist painted the four canvasses that are joined together in the finished painting. When these parts are brought together in Edinburgh College of Art it will be the first time the work will be seen in its entirety, even by the artist himself. There can be no images of the finished work till then. The images that are available before that are of the four canvasses seen either separately, or joined together to form a single flat painting 27 metres long. 

The exhibition is curated by Duncan Macmillan.
An illustrated catalogue will be available.

An Edinburgh College of Art Project supported by the Dunard Fund.

This exhibition is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2008.

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