JAMES TURRELL: New Work – May 20–August 26, 2006 at Griffin Gallery in Los Angeles

GRIFFIN is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by internationally acclaimed artist James Turrell. The exhibition will constitute the American debut of the artist’s Tall Glass series with three new works, along with End Around, a new work from his Ganzfeld series.  This exhibition of new work highlights the most recent developments in Turrell’s forty-year exploration of light and human perception. It also serves as a bracket to the artist’s previous GRIFFIN exhibition, which featured the light projection works from the 1960s that constituted his earliest experimentations with the medium.  As with that exhibition, the interior space of the gallery will be completely reconstructed to accommodate the new works. 

In his Tall Glass series, Turrell adds a temporal element to his perception-altering oeuvre. Each piece consists of a core of LEDs individually programmed by Turrell to carry out a subtle shift in color over time, similar to the deliberate but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes from late afternoon to night. However, these works’ careful construction insures that the viewer will see only a large floating, subtly changing field of light – a revelatory experience of photons as tangible entities and physical presence.

Also on exhibition will be End Around, one of Turrell’s Ganzfeld works. Upon entering the chamber housing the artwork, viewers instinctively approach what appears to be a faint wall of light in the distance. But upon reaching the light source, one’s entire visual field is consumed by an apparently limitless field of blue light. Turrell engineers the Ganzfeld works to eliminate all visual cues that the human brain uses to process depth. As a result, one is unable to tell whether the ethereal blue field he sees from the platform extends for inches, feet, or into infinity. The loaded act of “moving toward the light” and the subsequent experience of limitlessness reopen the spiritual dialectic that has perpetually surrounded Turrell’s light works.

Although light is used as the raw material, James Turrell believes human perception to be his true medium (in his own words, “My art is about your seeing”). His investigation into this field has extended well beyond the walls of the world’s foremost galleries and museums. Since 1972 Turrell has been transforming Roden Crater, a natural volcano located in northern Arizona, into a monumental artwork. Like Stonehenge and other great structures of civilizations past, Roden Crater is built to reveal and enhance celestial phenomena. Comprised of several “sky spaces” tunneled into the rock, the crater acts as an observatory so advanced in its design that one experiences not simply a sunset, but rather the revolution of the earth through space. Its completion will mark a historic achievement in the arts – not just of the modern age, but in all of recorded history.

James Turrell was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. Since his first solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967 and the Stedelijk in 1976, Turrell has been the subject of over 140 solo exhibitions worldwide. He has received numerous awards in the arts, including The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1984. He currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona.