Long Film for Four Projectors, 1974. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. © 2007 Anthony McCall. Photograph: Henry Graber

While the winter months bring darkness down in the afternoon, the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens is being flooded with mesmerising lights.

Anthony McCall’s ‘solid light’ installations send beguiling three-dimensional forms across dark and haze-filled spaces. The projections, including large cones, ellipses, waves and flat planes, gradually expand, contract, or sweep through one another.

Between You and I, 2006. Installation view at Peer/The Round Chapel, London, 2006. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. © 2007 Anthony McCall. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning

It’s the first major exhibition in London for the British artist, and will run until February 2 2008. He was a key figure in the avant-garde London Film-Makers Co-operative in the 1970s, and his practice since then has combined elements of film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance.

On moving to New York in 1973, McCall developed his solid light film series, emphasising the sculptural qualities of light, as in ‘Line Describing A Cone’ (1973), which begins as a white dot that grows, over 30 minutes, to create a circle opposite the projector.

The resulting hollow cone has an illusory quality of solidity that is at once strange, minimalist and ethereally beautiful.

Line Describing a Cone, 1973. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. © 2007 Anthony McCall. Photograph: Henry Graber

In these light projection artworks, which McCall gave up making for 20 years in between the 70s and now, film is reduced to its basic elements of light and duration – there is no screen or camera involved. The audience becomes part of the artwork, too, as their own bodies interrupt the light flow, modifying its form.

The Serpentine exhibition features McCall’s recent work using digital projectors, as well as early 16mm works, and previously unseen drawings, studies, scores, photographs and archival documents.