Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"As a tool for pushing back the frontiers of perception and instilling knowledge of the phenomenal world, light is for James Turrell not a vehicle for information, but is in and of itself information: 'My works are not a looking at, but a looking into; not the displacement of a space with mass, but the working of space; not objects in a room, but the room. The format is not things within space, but space itself.' With his light installations, Turrell creates volumes of light and shadow that are perceived as fluid substances, and the observer is disoriented by the awareness of their immateriality and the illusion that these nonetheless constitute perceptible entities, sometimes more so than real objects. " Excerpted from James Turrell, Charta/Nmac.
James Turrell is one of the founders of the California light and space art movement of the late 1960s and early 70s.
Edited with foreword and text by Michael Govan, Christine Y. Kim. Foreword by Gary Tinterow, Alison de Lima Greene. Text by Alison de Lima Greene, E.C. Krupp. Photographs by Florian Holzherr.
The only comprehensive volume on James Turrell is back in print—from early prints and light projections to his monumental Roden Crater project
Clth, 9.75 x 11.75 in. / 304 pgs / 202 color / 54 bw. | 7/4/2023 | In stock $85.00
Published by Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Edited with foreword and text by Michael Govan, Christine Y. Kim. Foreword by Gary Tinterow, Alison de Lima Greene. Text by Alison de Lima Greene, E.C. Krupp. Photographs by Florian Holzherr.
This definitive book illuminates the origins and motivations of James Turrell’s incredibly diverse and exciting body of work—from his Mendota studio days to his monumental work-in-progress Roden Crater. Whether projecting shapes on a flat wall or into the corner of a gallery space, Turrell is perpetually asking us to "go inside and greet the light"—evoking his Quaker upbringing. In fact, all of Turrell’s work has been influenced by his life experiences with aviation, science and psychology, and as a key player in Los Angeles’ exploding art scene of the 1960s. Enhanced by thoughtful essays and an illuminating interview with the artist, this monograph explores every aspect of Turrell’s career—from his early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, through his installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, to two-dimensional experiments with holograms. It also features an in-depth look at Roden Crater, a site-specific intervention into the landscape near Flagstaff, Arizona, which is presented through models, plans, photographs and drawings. Fans of this highly influential artist will find much to savor in this wide-ranging and beautiful book, featuring specially commissioned photography by Florian Holzherr. As an undergraduate, James Turrell (born 1943) studied psychology and mathematics, transitioning to art only at MFA level. The recipient of several prestigious awards, including Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona.
For more than 50 years, James Turrell has devoted himself to the treatment of immateriality, materiality and perception, making light a sensual and spiritual experience. Turrell floods rooms with light that is experienced as gentle seas of color or as an intensely glowing fog, taking observers to the very limits of their perception. Turrell eliminates the possibility of orienting one's location by means of an object or spatial limits. The artist himself constantly emphasizes that his work is best described as "perceptual art."
This comprehensive volume, published for the artist's exhibition at Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany, combines key works from Turrell's various phases. Among the works included are Sloan Red, one of his early projections in which geometric light objects appear to float in space. A piece from 2016, from the important series of Wedgeworks, shows how the artist creates illusionist spatial situations using light. The "ganzfeld" experiment Apani, which attracted much attention at the Venice Biennale in 2011, allows the visitor to experience how all imaginable spatial contours can be made to dissolve in light and color. Turrell's famous long-term project Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert, which the artist has been converting into a kind of observatory since the 1970s—is also represented here, alongside artworks created especially for the Museum Frieder Burda.
As an undergraduate, James Turrell (born 1943) studied psychology and mathematics, transitioning to art only at MFA level. A practicing Quaker, he has described one of his earliest memories: his grandmother inviting him to “go inside and greet the light” at Quaker meetings. The recipient of several prestigious awards, including Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Text by Carmen Giménez, Nat Trotman, Arthur Zajonc.
The artist’s first solo exhibition in a New York museum since 1980, James Turrell considers his long-standing explorations of perception, light, color and space with special attention to the role of site-specificity in his practice. Local audiences find new occasion to experience his work through a major new project created especially for the Guggenheim, Aten Reign (2013), recasting the museum’s rotunda as a volume of shifting natural and artificial light. One of the most dramatic transformations of the museum ever conceived, the installation reimagines Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic architecture--its openness to nature, its graceful curves, its magnificent sense of space and light--as one of Turrell’s Skyspaces. Experienced for the first time only from below, the rotunda appears not as an open void but as a mass of vibrant color that expands and contracts above the heads of visitors, and at the installation’s core, daylight from the museum’s oculus connects the work to the outside environment. Through these interventions, Turrell rekindles the museum’s identity as a “temple of spirit” (to quote the museum’s first director, Hilla Rebay), encouraging a state of meditative contemplation. This full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition at the Guggenheim, detailing the production of the rotunda installation and situating it in the context of Turrell’s career. In addition to beautifully reproduced images featuring the artist’s early works, his magnum opus Roden Crater Project (1979– ), and documentation of Aten Reign, this volume includes essays by the show’s curators, Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Carmen Giménez, and Associate Curator Nat Trotman, and Arthur Zajonc, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Amherst College. As an undergraduate, James Turrell (born 1943) studied psychology and mathematics, transitioning to art at MFA level. A practicing Quaker, one of his earliest memories is of his grandmother inviting him to “go inside and greet the light” at Quaker meetings. The recipient of several prestigious awards such as Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Markus Brüderlin, Richard Andrews, Annelie Lütgens.
James Turrell (born 1943) has been working with light in all its manifestations since the 1960s. Moving beyond the purely scientific investigation of optical phenomena, his works are designed to induce extraordinary experiences for the viewer, through the manipulation of light and color. The artist has been pursing this aim since 1974, when he began transforming the Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert—into an observatory, inside of which visitors can immerse themselves in the embrace of an unusually pure experience of light. Turrell is currently realizing his largest installation to date in the 18-by-30-meter hall at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. This work resembles the Roden Crater project, inverted and rotated 90 degrees; it thus provides a foretaste of Turrell's still incomplete epic masterpiece. This richly illustrated publication documents and contextualizes the genesis of this extraordinary and ambitious work of art.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Matthias Haldemann.
James Turrell (born 1943) first came to prominence in the late 1960s as a leading artist in the California Light and Space Movement. Informed by his studies in perceptual psychology and optical illusions, Turrell's works impact the body, mind and spirit. Zug Zuoz is devoted to two contrasting Turrell installations in Switzerland, both of which forge an encounter between the architectural interior and the world beyond it. "Light Transport," located in the city of Zug, immerses the internal façades and glass roof of the local train station in splendid colors; "Skyspace Piz Uter" in Zuoz is a plain, rounded stone structure with a circular aperture in its roof through which to view the night sky. These two works are usefully representative of the dichotomies explored in Turrell's practice: artificial versus natural light, urban versus rural settings, color versus blackness. This monograph supplies thorough documentation on the two installations.
Published by Charta/Nmac. Text by William P. Banks, Jimena Blázquez, James Turrell, Sharon G. Goto, Michael Govan.
The eight-year-old NMAC Foundation, located on the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula, invites contemporary international artists to Spain to complete site-specific projects. For the last two years NMAC has focused on an ambitious collaboration with Los Angeles-born artist James Turrell, legendary for his incredibly ambitious masterwork at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that he has been transforming into a celestial observatory for the past 30 years. Focused on perception, space and light, Turrell's NMAC installation "Stupa," documented in this volume, is invisible from the outside. Viewers walk through a short "tunnel into a stone stupa--a dome-shaped mandalic structure found in Buddhist architecture, built to house relics. Turrell's stupa frames the sky: as the light changes, the viewers' perception is tested, and light and structure blur until the light acquires an eerie tangibility and specificity.
PUBLISHER Charta/Nmac
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 96 pgs / 67 color / 2 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 10/31/2009 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2009 p. 82
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788881587308TRADE List Price: $29.95 CAD $35.00
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Ursula Sinnreich. Text by Gernot Böhme, Julian Heynen, Agostino de Rosa.
Nobody who has experienced an installation by James Turrell forgets the encounter--he makes light tangible in ways that boggle perception and almost seem to defy physics, as if you could reach into the space you see when you close your eyes. A lifelong explorer of perceptual psychology, Turrell is undoubtedly the most influential contemporary light artist, as well as one of America's most popular artists. In Geometry of Light, the first significant Turrell survey in many years, an extraordinary body of work covering several decades is assessed. At the book's center is the series of works known as Sky Spaces, a signature Turrell conception in which the sky is made to seem "on top of" the room's ceiling, and which has become a mini-genre unto itself within light art. Academic, philosophical and art-historical essays explicate these perceptual spaces, whose evolution is closely allied to Turrell's development of the Roden Crater Project in the Arizona desert, where he began constructing an observatory in 1974. Also included is the latest installation, "Skyspace/Camera Obscura Space," which Turrell conceived for the Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst in Unna, Germany. As an undergraduate, James Turrell (born in Los Angeles, 1943) studied psychology and mathematics, transitioning to art only at MFA level. A practicing Quaker, one of his earliest memories is of his grandmother inviting him to "go inside and greet the light" at Quaker meetings. The recipient of several prestigious awards such as Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Wolfgang Hausler. Essays by Andrea Jonas-Edel, Karl Karau, Jan Linders, Klaus Reese. Introduction by Bernd Bauer.
James Turrell works with phenomena of light like no other artist. Since the 1960s he has been building astonishing spaces that allow light to be experienced both in its material and its spiritual qualities. In recent years Turrell has developed an increasing interest in the staging of architecture through the use of light. He has realized several landmark works with this in mind--his light installation for the opening of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, his light design for an administrative building in Leipzig, and the light events on the Pont du Gard, a Roman bridge in Southern France. James Turrell: Lighting a Planet documents his all-inclusive staging of Planet m, including numerous photographs, sketches, interviews, comparative illustrations and an enlightening essay. Planet m is the Bertelsmann pavilion, the secret landmark of the EXPO 2000 at Hanover, which takes on a nocturnal second life through Turrell's ever-shifting atmospheres of light.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Peter Noever. Essays by Daniel Birnbaum, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michael Rotondi, Paul Virilio.
In 1967, when 23-year old James Turrell created his first light projection, he broke new ground in a way that would decisively influence his generation and the development of art. Though Turrell worked in the context of Minimalism and the Earthwork movement, his art at this early stage displayed--as it still does--a sensibility all its own. This book reveals the ways in which Turrell's art has developed, and offers an extensive overview of his work from its earliest stages to the present. Turrell is above all preoccupied with the phenomenon of light--and his architectural projects and installations often transform their surroundings into transluscent sculptural bodies. From his first Projection Pieces to the Roden Crater Project in the Arizona desert, this volume presents over 30 years of this seminal artist's work, and includes critical essays by Daniel Birnbaum, Georges Didi-Hubermann, Michael Rotondi, and Paul Virilio.
James Turrell: Extraordinary Ideas—Realized
James Turrell
James Turrell: The Wolfsburg Project
James Turrell: Zug Zuoz
James Turrell
James Turrell: Geometry of Light
James Turrell: Lighting A Planet
James Turrell: The Other Horizon
James Turrell: Eclipse