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This May, legendary artist James Turrell celebrates his 70th birthday with a trio of blockbuster exhibitions across the United States. Known for his explorations of light and space, Turrell has inspired awe among audiences for almost five decades.
Working in close collaboration, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York concurrently present complementary yet independently-curated exhibitions, which tell the story of the artist's pioneering experiments in perception and light projection. The exhibitions incidentally coincide with the debut of another of Turrell's work - a dramatic site-specific light installation at The Shops at Crystals, the Libeskind-designed luxury retail complex in Las Vegas.
'After you spend time looking at Turrell, it's like restoring your connoisseurship of light,' says Alison de Lima Greene of MFAH, 'It makes you pay attention to the difference between daylight, incandescent light, of LED light, of neon light. There's this substance all around us, and yet we never pay attention to its effect.'
Though light is Turrell's instrument, the artist regards perception as his true medium. By isolating luminosity, Turrell asks his audiences to consider this ephemeral material as a thing upon itself and its effect on the body. The system behind each work of art may be complex, but the effect is immediately grasped. 'It's a marriage of the complex and scientific,' says Christine Y. Kim of LACMA, '[Turrell's works have] incredible detail and complexity, but can also be experienced by a person of any age, generation or background because it relates to our bodies.'
Picture: 'Raemar Pink White', 1969. Collection of Art & Research, Las Vegas. Courtesy: Kayne Griffin Corcoran; Photography: Robert Wedemeyer
Writer: Carren Jao
