Artist: James Turrell

I want to make something that people direct their attention toward. It’s not that different from when I was a child in the crib, fascinated by the light I saw above me.

We usually use light to illuminate things. I am interested in the “thingness” of light itself. Light does not so much reveal, as it is the revelation itself.
- James Turrell

Gagosian presents an exhibition of works by James Turrell. It features two new large installations: a Ganzfeld piece, All Clear, and a Wedgework piece, Either Or (both 2024). Additionally included is an early projection work, Shanta, Red (1968); the newer Corner Projection, Afrum Again (2024); and six new in-wall Glassworks pieces that present every configuration of the series. Also on view are holograms, models, prints, and plans of Roden Crater (1976–), along with survey lap desks used in their production, as well as other photographs, prints, and archival materials.

Since the 1960s, Turrell has worked with perceptual phenomena ranging from sensory deprivation to optical effects. In 1966, he began using planes of light in relation to architectural interiors, launching an ongoing manipulation of built and natural environments. Turrell continues to use light as his primary material to work with the medium of perception, creating formally simple projects that employ new technologies to examine the limits of seeing, sometimes inducing meditative states.

The main space on the Le Bourget gallery’s ground floor houses Ganzfeld, All Clear. Viewers enter a rounded, all-white pavilion within which they are bathed with colored light generated by an LED screen and backlighting. The lack of corners and edges in the space further contributes to a loss of orientation. The series is named for the Ganzfeld Effect, which can occur when an absence of depth, shape, and distance indicators causes the brain to mistake visual noise for tangible information. Turrell’s work evokes the disorienting experiences of skiing in whiteout conditions, ascending into enveloping clouds while flying, or diving into the void of the deep ocean. The landscape alluded to is comparable to outer space, where all horizons are lost, and the abstraction of Boolean algebra. Echoes of such experiences occur when space is dissolved ephemerally in the Ganzfeld piece, All Clear. This occurs at timed intervals to prevent the disorientation from becoming overwhelming.

Also on the gallery’s ground floor is Either Or, a new installation in the Wedgework series. Here, projected light interacts with reflective surfaces, lending it a physical “thingness” through which the room’s interior architecture appears to expand beyond its physical limits.

The surrounding hallways house six Glassworks pieces that relate to Turrell’s recent exhibition Light of the Presence at Gagosian Athens, as well as aquatints and woodcuts that explore the qualities of light in Aten Reign, the artist’s 2014 installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The two adjacent ground floor galleries house Shanta, Red and Afrum Again, in which seemingly solid forms are conjured by light projected into interior corners.

Alongside these works, archival materials related to Roden Crater dating from 1982 to 2024 are on view, along with blueprints, holograms, models, photographs, a three-dimensional photo viewer, and two lap desks that were used by Turrell throughout the 1980s. Roden Crater is a vast artwork built into a volcanic cinder cone in the landscape of the Painted Desert of Northern Arizona to form a naked-eye observatory for the contemplation of the light and space of the sky.