Gray Wielebinski – The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low

ICA London currently presents the first solo institutional exhibition of cross-disciplinary artist Texas-born, London and Los Angeles based Gray Wielebinski. The exhibition features all new site-specific work across painting, sculpture, installation and sound, addressing the complex state of individual agency in todays age, specifically, anxieties underpinning apocalypticism, simulation and the systems that mediate our behaviour.

Expanding Wielebinski’s exploration of the boundaries of private and public spaces, with references spanning sci-fi, Cold War legacies and games, the exhibition transforms the ICA into an investigation of constructed worlds within worlds.

Gray Wielebinski: The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Rob Harris, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

The exhibition’s title, The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low, is taken from a 1978 essay by science fiction writer and critic Samuel R. Delany. Delany uses the sentence as an example of the corrective and revisionary process of reading science fiction, in which ‘each new word revises the complex picture we had a moment before.’

The motif of the sun appears in multiple instances in Wielebinski's works, mapping a collapse of temporalities. We are suspended between a past, present and future in which the sun is a symbol of both apocalypse and a glorious life force.

In the wake of a pandemic which exposed our governing systems and conventions to scrutiny they could not withstand, this exhibition imagines how we might position our individual and public selves once again. With this, comes an unexpected playfulness and optimism, the ineffable condition of living in a time in which apocalyptic precarity feels realistic and maybe also revelatory.

Portrait of Gray Wielebinksi. Photo by Suzannah Pettigrew

The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low is open at ICA London until 23rd December.