Anthony James (b. 1974) is a London-born, Los Angeles-based artist who graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design with a degree in painting. James is known for his monumental sculptures and installations that embrace
Minimalism, Transcendentalism and Light & Space. In the winter of 2023, James became the first and only visual artist to have work exhibited on all seven continents when he installed one of his stainless steel, glass, and LED Portals at White Desert’s base camp in Antarctica near the South Pole.
“It doesn’t matter what your education level is, what language you speak, what culture you are brought up in, or where you are from, my work deals with a universal language based in sacred geometry,” says James. “It’s innate to everyone on the planet, so it’s an honor to have my work on view in every continent.”
James’s major public installations have occupied a garden at the Royal Horticultural Society’s annual Chelsea Flower Show in 2022, where the artist installed three light sculptures emulating natural crystal formations in tandem with 16 transmorphic color sculptures at Saatchi Gallery that were connected to a central ethernet “brain” feeding algorithmic cues to the sculptures, mimicking the mycorrhizal networking of birch forests. In 2021, James engaged the facade of the Flannels flagship on London’s Oxford Street with 33 million LEDs that wrapped the boutique's exterior inside three dozen digital canvases projecting films exploring the infinite interiors of the artist’s Portal sculptures. He has also worked with the city of Westminster to install three monumental Light Field sculptures at Marble Arch in Hyde Park that drew more than 250,000 visitors in three months.
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“In my practice I’m trying to give a visual demonstration of the infinite or the divinity inside us all,” says James. “If you’re seeing and experiencing this ever-expanding cosmos, hopefully that’s a window to explore this underlying law of nature, this inner light.”
Anthony James’s sculptural installations have been exhibited at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Berkeley Square (London) Art Basel (Switzerland) and The Armory Show (New York). He has works currently on public display in Aspen, Beverly Hills, Singapore, Dubai, London, and New York. His work was recently featured in the major motion picture Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story and has been the subject of solo gallery exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery (London); Opera Gallery (New York, Dubai, London); Brand New Gallery (Milan), There-There and Patrick Painter, Inc. (Los Angeles) and notable group shows at Blum & Poe (Los Angeles), SHOWstudio (London), Gavlak (Palm Beach) and Thread Waxing Space (New York). His work has also been featured in The New York Times, CULTURED, Artnet, Vogue, Whitewall, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Wallpaper* and his Morphic Fields exhibition at Walter Storms Galerie (Munich) was the subject of a titular catalog published by Hatje Cantz.