Doug Wheeler Builds "Infinity Environment" at David Zwirner Doug Gates/Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Doug Wheeler's installation "DW 68 VEN MCASD 11" (1968-2011), in San Diego. THE artist Doug Wheeler tells two stories, both having to do with light, that go a long way toward explaining why he is so revered by many fellow artists - as a visionary and a relentlessly stubborn perfectionist - and also why his work has been seen by so few American artgoers over the last few decades, particularly those in New York. Doug Wheeler, a founder of the Light and Space movement, specializes in installations. The first story takes place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where several years ago Mr. Wheeler created a complex installation he calls an "infinity environment," featuring a light-saturated, all-white, rounded room with no corners or sharp angles, rendering viewers unable to fix their eyes on any surface. It invokes an experience of light itself as an almost tactile presence. As Mr. Wheeler continued to tweak the piece, a small boy walked up to the room and hesitated before entering, putting his hands in front of him because his senses told him that the square entrance was a wall, not simply a wall of light flooding his vision. "I thought, "O.K., I can stop worrying so much and being mad about them letting people in too early," " Mr. Wheeler said recently over coffee at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, where he has just opened his first solo New York gallery show at the age of 72, remaking a cavernous interior into a kind of immaculate white vacuum tube - the city's first infinity environment. The second story he tells happened in the late 1960s, in a former dime store in Venice, Calif., the studio where he first began creating the ethereal, experiential work that made him a founder of the so-called Light and Space movement, along with fellow West Coast artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Mary Corse. One afternoon Mr. Wheeler welcomed a couple of prominent dealers from a New York gallery - "who shall remain nameless," he now says tersely - to show off a new work using phosphorus paint and lights to create the sensation of a mistlike plane bisecting part of the studio. The dealers walked right past the piece without noticing it, making a beeline to some earlier, popular light works that hung on the walls like paintings. "I just thought what idiots they were for not seeing it," he said. Now maybe it wasn't powerful enough. Maybe it was just my arrogance. But at that time I didn't think of it that way. "What they expected to see, they saw," he added, "and then they left." He bid them a friendly goodbye and never did business with the gallery again. His career has been punctuated by such decorous but epic refusals. He has said no to major museum exhibitions, because of his doubts that the works would be shown in the way they were intended. In a career of more than four decades he has never had a full-time American gallery represent him except for a brief, troubled turn with the Los Angeles dealer Doug Chrismas. He even once turned down Leo Castelli, at the time the most powerful dealer in the country, because he felt that Castelli wanted to push him to crank out versions of older works, from which "I'd already learned everything I wanted to learn." "I heard he told people he thought I was crazy," Mr. Wheeler said. The effect of this deeply principled approach has been that his work has been seen mostly on the West Coast and in Europe, where the Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who died in 2010, and his wife, Giovanna, were enthusiastic supporters. Through the Panza collection, Wheeler pieces are now in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn in Washington. But sightings of the work on the East Coast have been few and far between, partly because of the complexity of their installation. For several years in the mid-1970s Mr. Wheeler grew so frustrated with the art world that he took up screenwriting to support himself, so he could keep making his art his way. The one result that made it to the screen was a 1978 television trucker movie, "Steel Cowboy," with James Brolin and Rip Torn, of which Mr. Wheeler says, gratefully, "There was nothing of my work left in it at all."