Artist: James Turrell

Almine Rech Paris pressents its 12th exhibition with James Turrell, over 3 decades. A new light piece is on view from the artist's ongoing Glasses series, begun in 2004.

For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell, born in Los Angeles, California in 1943, has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage the viewer with the limits and wonder of human perception.

Turrell’s concept of a Tall Glass or Wide Glass is a unique aperture — rectangular or elliptical, horizontal or vertical, rarely some other shapes have been created — in which the work composition, light and colors, develop gradually over the course of an hour perceptible through the use of translucent materials. In the past, Turrell’s Tall and Wide Glasses works were realized in neon, but for the last 15 years the artist has turned to LED technologies, which allow for richer hues and a lower light level, offering the artist more freedom as to which shapes, transitions, and color combinations he can include within the series. The works in this series are the result of Turrell’s research, started in the mid 1960s, on light as a material that affects perception of the human eye.

"James Turrell and I met fifteen years ago. I have learned to know him intermittently over all these years. Being aware of an artist’s life doesn’t always help to understand his work. In certain aspects it can even make you view the work with too many preconceptions. Given the importance of James Turrell’s art work, and that his life and opinions are so peculiar, uncommon, and strong, I believe that this biography is of great interest.

AR: Your art makes people look inside themselves and toward light, sky, space. Do you believe your art can make people move away from materialism towards a more spiritual attitude?

JT: Yes, if they are spiritually inclined! When people speak about light they use for description a ‘vocabulary of light’: near death experience, religious transformation, spiritual journeys…My work is about the thingness of light itself, feeling the light, there is no religious message! Gold has no value except as we give it. We are very casual about light, cavalier. Light is not ephemeral, it is a material, photons are matter. They exhibit wave phenomena just as water."

— Extract from Almine Rech in conversation with James Turrell on September 9, 2004
Brussels-Paris, Thalys