Fred Eversley, Pioneer in Light and Space Movement, Has Died Aged 83

Fred Eversley, the Los Angeles-based sculptor associated with the California Light and Space movement, has died aged 83.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941, Eversley attended Brooklyn Technical High School before majoring in electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, where he was the only Black engineering student. After graduation, he worked for five years as an engineer at Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo, California, and was part of the team that prepared for the Apollo 11 lunar landing.

In California, he joined a community of experimental artists, including Larry Bell, De Wain Valentine and John McCraken, living and working in Venice Beach. ‘We had to get up every morning at 8 o’clock, put on a tie and jacket and go to El Segundo,’ he said of his team in a video for the Getty Conservation Institution in 2022, ‘but in the evening we came back to Venice and hung out with the local crowd. It was there I got introduced to my generation of artists.’

After a near fatal car accident in 1967, Eversley retired from engineering to dedicate himself fully to art, drawing extensively on his technological background throughout his career. His signature works, for instance, were inspired by his interest in the parabola – a geometric shape that concentrates all forms of energy to a single focal point. These luminous, lens-like sculptures were made using polyester resin and industrial pigments and then hand sanded and polished in an arduous 18-step process that resulted in highly transparent, glossy surfaces.

His fascination with the parabola and the origins of energy drove his works. ‘Nothing exists without energy,’ Eversley said in a 2022 interview. ‘It’s the most essential concept for the basis of all life… Given the state of the world now – from the climate crisis to extreme oil and gas shortages – the significance of energy as a concept and material is apparent.’

While he didn’t enjoy the same level of success as some of the artists he was associated with, such as Bell, James Turrell and Robert Irwin, who were similarly interested in perceptual phenomena, Eversley worked consistently throughout the years, supporting himself through residencies and public art projects. Reflecting on his career to The New York Times in 2022, the artist said he was ‘lucky to have had really great commissions, without having a famous gallery doing it for me.’

Nevertheless, in 2018, Eversley joined the roster at David Kordansky Gallery, which helped raise his profile considerably. His first exhibition at the gallery, ‘Chromospheres’, in 2019, brought together ten ‘parabola’ sculptures that he conceived between 1969 and 1974, but didn’t cast until 2018.

‘Antithetical to looking at a screen or even a printed page – which is characterized by solitude and flatness – here, looking (at the object and ourselves) becomes looking through (at others), and vice versa,’ wrote Molly Larkey in her review for Contemporary Art Review LA. ‘[The sculptures] combination of transparency, reflection, and distortion renders visible a process whereby cultural artifacts and ideas are in fact lenses that direct and shape our perceptions.’

In 2022, David Kordansky Gallery published the first monograph of the artists’ work, and he was celebrated in a large-scale retrospective at Orange County Museum of Art, which referenced his long relationship with the institution. ‘Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World)’ covered 50 years of work, including a number of new seven-foot sculptures, which the artist described at the time as ‘both a leap and a loop.’

‘Fred’s work wasn’t just visual, it was an invitation to experience light, space and energy in ways we had never imagined,’ said David Kordansky in a statement. ‘I will miss him dearly.’

_{Main image: Fred Eversley, Blue Para, 2004, cast polyester, 13 × 56 × 56 cm}