Holt's "Locators with Loci" on view in "Minimal" at the Bourse de Commerce
Nancy Holt's 1972 sculpture Locators with Loci is on view in the exhibition Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris on show through January 18, 2026. Curated by Jessica Morgan, Director of Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition traces the diversity of this Minimal Art since the 1960s through over a hundred works by some forty international artists, many from the Pinault Collection.
Locators with Loci belongs to series of sculptures that began in 1971 when Nancy Holt made her first sculptures—“seeing devices” drawing attention to visual perception and place. The Locators, as she named them, comprise industrial piping welded into a T-shape, made to be viewed through with one eye to direct attention to the time-bound processes of vision. The Locators directly develop from Holt’s experiments with photography, and they provide a means to locate perception.
Locators with Loci brings together a group of four Locators whose viewpoint shifts in angle and distance from the wall. Each Locator looks to a painted black Loci, which graduate from a perfect circle to an elongated ellipse. Although the shapes on the wall shift are not identical, when one looks through each Locator they see a perfect black circle edged by a ring of light, an experience to seeing a full moon on a clear night or an eclipse.
Nancy Holt, Locators with Loci (1972)
Installation view: Nancy Holt: Circles of Light, Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany, 2024
Four steel pipes, black paint
Overall dimensions variable (site responsive; Locators 60 x 12 x 2 in. (152 x 31 x 5 cm) each
Photograph: Luca Girardini
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
