James Turrell

Gagosian is pleased to announce After Glow, a presentation of prints and related works by James Turrell at its gallery in London’s Burlington Arcade. These works are linked to Aten Reign, a major 2013 installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Roden Crater (1976–), Turrell’s lifelong, ongoing masterwork—an immersive, site-specific artwork and naked-eye observatory painstakingly embedded within a volcanic cinder cone in Northern Arizona’s Painted Desert, where decades of sustained artistic, architectural, and astronomical research converge.

Turrell works with perceptual phenomena ranging from sensory deprivation to optical effects. In 1966, he began using planes of light in relation to architectural interiors, launching his practice of manipulating built and natural environments. He continues to use light as his primary material, examining the limits of perception and prompting meditative contemplation. The artist notes: “My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light—it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.”

The prints on view in the Burlington Arcade gallery are drawn from Suite from Aten Reign (2014), which explores the luminous qualities of Aten Reign, a skylight installation that fundamentally transformed the perceived space of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda at the Guggenheim. Capturing fleeting arrangements of concentric ovals in gradated colors, these woodcuts and etchings with aquatint push the capacity of ink to replicate transitional light effects.