Born in 1939 in Globe, Arizona, Douglas Wheeler attended the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles (now California Institute of the Arts, Valencia) in the early 1960s. Long associated with the so-called Light and Space artists working in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, Wheeler is best known for his immersive installations produced through the architectural modification of the space of an entire room. In these works, controlled applications of light, and sometimes sound, produce a sensate impression of infinite space. By dematerializing the architecture, Wheeler transforms these rooms into abstract worlds. Wheeler began his career in the early 1960s as an abstract painter of white paintings subtly inflected with color. He first incorporated light as a medium in 1965 by attaching neon elements to his canvases—works that seem to glow with a self-contained inner light. Wheeler gradually abandoned paint as a medium to produce fabricated “light paintings” and “light encasements,” large, vacuum-formed Plexiglas squares edged inside with neon tubing. Installed in controlled environments—all-white rooms that have been modified and darkly lit—the light-rimmed forms appear to float in space. With his Light Walls, first exhibited in 1969, Wheeler expanded this concept to an architectural scale, transforming a room wall through the use of neon lights embedded within the floor, walls, and ceiling. And in the Infinity Environments that he inaugurated in 1975—for example, SA MI DW SN 2 75—an entire room is dematerialized; a visitor has the experience of entering a seemingly limitless white void, in which light itself assumes an almost palpable quality. Wheeler has also conceived installations that deploy acoustic elements in order to produce certain experiences. In PSAD Synthetic Desert III, initially described in a 1968 drawing and first realized at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2017, a near-total suppression of sound contributes to an immersive environment that replicates the optical and acoustic sensation of distance in the Painted Desert in Arizona. Wheeler’s first solo exhibition opened at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1968 and was followed by others at the Ace Gallery, Venice, California (1970); Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf (1970); and Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan (1975). More recently, he has had solo shows at FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France (2012), and Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2012). Wheeler’s work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions since the 1960s, including at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1969); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1969); Tate Gallery, London (1970); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (1976); Venice Biennale (1976); Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (1983, 1986, 1995, and 2003); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1997); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2000); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008–9); and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2011–12). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles and Santa Fe.