
Raining in San Francisco / Going Home after Work
2019
A tangle of welded steel wire hangs from the wall in apparent disorder, casting what seems at first like an incidental shadow. Then the light hits, and the chaos resolves: the shadow thrown by Larry Kagan's "Raining in San Francisco / Going Home after Work" (2019) is a crisp, legible scene of figures moving through rain, rendered with the clarity of a mid-century illustration. The sculpture operates as two simultaneous realities, one physical and one projected, and the collector who lives with it encounters a small daily astonishment each time the light source aligns. Kagan has spent decades refining this practice of engineered revelation, working at the intersection of sculpture, drawing, and optics. The steel elements are not decorative; each bend and arc is calculated to contribute to a precise photographic shadow while remaining visually abstract on its own terms. The result is a work that rewards close attention to craft as much as to concept. There is nothing digital or mechanically assisted in the process. The image emerges entirely from the geometry of bent metal and the behavior of directed light, making the hand of the artist present in every curve. Works from this body of practice hold particular appeal for collectors interested in the phenomenological traditions of late-twentieth-century sculpture, as well as those drawn to work that transforms with changing conditions in a domestic or institutional space. "Raining in San Francisco / Going Home after Work" carries an additional layer of narrative warmth, its subject evoking the quotidian poetry of urban life, commuters, weather, the specific texture of a city at dusk. Available through Louis K. Meisel Gallery, the piece represents Kagan at a mature and fully realized moment in his practice.
- Location
- Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York, NY
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Artists in conversation
Tim Noble
British · b. 1966
Noble and his collaborator Sue Webster create sculptures from accumulated debris and cast objects that project crisp figurative shadow images when lit from a specific angle, directly mirroring Kagan's core concept of chaotic physical form resolving into a legible narrative scene through projected shadow.
Sue Webster
British · b. 1967
As co-creator with Tim Noble of shadow sculpture works, Webster shares the identical methodology of welded and assembled three dimensional forms that appear abstract until light transforms them into precise figurative projections, exactly as Kagan's wire tangles resolve into urban figure scenes.
Diet Wiegman
Dutch · b. 1944
Wiegman has worked extensively with light projection and shadow art since the 1980s, constructing assemblages of three dimensional objects whose shadows produce coherent figurative and narrative imagery, sharing Kagan's phenomenological interest in the transformation of physical chaos into projected meaning.



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