James Turrell

First Light (Columns)

1989-90

Emerging in the mid-1960s with the Southern California Light and Space movement, James Turrell (b. 1943) has devoted his career to artwork that challenges the limits of human perception. From his early experiments with geometric projections that transfigured space with light to the colossal decades-long undertaking of transforming an extinct volcano in northern Arizona into the immersive Roden Crater, he has strived to “create an experience of wordless thought” through his art.

An avid pilot as well as an artist, the Los Angeles native has long considered the sky to be his studio. Before creating his first light sculptures as a graduate student at the University of California at Irvine, he studied perceptual psychology and math at Pomona College. His practice has been an ongoing investigation of new techniques that would envelop viewers in light and color, whether through his research of optical phenomena related to sensory deprivation or his construction of complex architectural spaces that allow visitors to meditate on the materiality of light.

Most encounters with Turrell’s art are site-specific, such as his series of Skyspaces, which includes more than 80 chambers around the globe with apertures open to the sky. The shifts of daylight from sunrise to sunset make every moment in a Skyspace unique. To build his frequently monumental visions of space, light and color, he has also worked in far-flung corners of the planet, from the 1996 Celestial Vault — situated in an artificial crater in the Netherlands, where visitors can contemplate the contour where Earth meets sky — to the nine installations in the James Turrell Museum nestled in a remote vineyard in Argentina. Whether installations, prints, drawings, models or holograms, all of Turrell’s art has engaged with the wonder of light and how it shapes our observation of the world. 

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