Installation view with James Turrell, Knowing Light (2007)
Artwork © James Turrell. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis
Installation view with James Turrell, Rounded Up (2024)
Artwork © James Turrell. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis
James Turrell
Rounded Up, 2024
Computer-programmed LED panel and mixed media, 52 × 52 inches (132.1 × 132.1 cm)
© James Turrell. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis
James Turrell
Rounded Up, 2024 (installation time-lapse video)
Computer-programmed LED panel and mixed media, 52 × 52 inches (132.1 × 132.1 cm)
© James Turrell. Video: Pushpin Films
James Turrell
Knowing Light, 2007
Computer-programmed LED panel and mixed media, 80 × 50 inches (203.2 × 127 cm)
© James Turrell. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis
James Turrell
Knowing Light, 2007 (installation time-lapse video)
Computer-programmed LED panel and mixed media, 80 × 50 inches (203.2 × 127 cm)
© James Turrell. Video: Pushpin Films
We weren’t made for the midday sun, we were made for twilight. When light is reduced the pupil opens and we can really feel it.
—James Turrell
Gagosian is pleased to announce Light of the Presence, a pairing of two works from Glass Series (2001–) by James Turrell, opening at the gallery in Athens on April 11. Knowing Light (2007) and Rounded Up (2024) are on view in two separate rooms on the ground floor.
Since the 1960s, Turrell has been exploring perceptual phenomena ranging from sensory deprivation to optical effects. In 1966, he began working with light in his studio in Ocean Park, California, and early works such as Afrum-Proto (1966), which employ planes of light in relation to architectural structures, became the basis for an ongoing manipulation of built and natural environments. Turrell continues to use light as his primary subject and material in formally simple projects that apply new technology to examine the limits of seeing and induce meditative states.
An exhibition at Gagosian, Hong Kong, brings together three of James Turrell’s Glasswork pieces along with site plans, photographs, and models of his Skyspaces and Roden Crater. Here, Alice Godwin explores the history of the Glassworks and their relationship to the artist’s wider practice.
Tracking works by Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, and Eric Orr as outliers and outcroppings of the California Light and Space movement, Michael Auping argues that darkness—the absence of light and space—is a key element of the aesthetic.
