Alexander de Betak: Truss Light Sculptures 01

For more than three decades, de Betak worked with light, scale and the dynamics of perception to redefine the spectacle of live shows. In this new body of work, he turns to the very apparatus that made them possible – the truss and the stage light. De Betak transforms this peripheral infrastructure from supporting act to protagonist – reimagining it as something with its own permanence, atmosphere and presence. These new sculptures extend de Betak’s ongoing explorations of light, scale and material contrasts. In 2025, coinciding with Frieze London, de Betak turned his London studio into a large-scale environment of light and mirrors, an evolving work that recast stark office lighting as something sublime. In early 2026, for Gstaad Art Week, he conceived a site-specific work within a traditional Swiss barn in the Bernese Oberland, drawing a line between alpine and Japanese traditions of restraint and ritual. Each is driven by the same instinct for reversal – harsh industrial light rendered warm, the utilitarian made otherworldly. The exhibition unfolds across two series and two rooms. In the gallery’s contemporary space, a series of works are composed using genuine trusses and stage lights – raw aluminum, reassembled into large-scale freestanding and wall-mounted forms. In the historic Beaux-Arts Stone Room, the same forms are transfigured into bronze – hand-cast in a French foundry through an exacting process of moulding, casting, sandblasting and polishing, with over twenty moulds required for a single piece. Forms that once served the temporary image are now rendered in a material long associated with permanence, memory and monument throughout art history.