This is contemporary art as you have never seen before, and promises an experience not to be missed. Once inside, saturated in colour, with no edges or corners, we are uncertain of our surrounds – a feeling akin to walking on clouds. This light cycle for one person is a bodily kaleidoscope with patterns of crystals, shards of light, stars, galaxies and nebulae. This immersive experience sees one viewer enter the installation every 15 minutes. One of the highlights of the exhibition is the Perceptual cell, ‘Bindu shards’ (2010). ‘After green’ (1993) is an immersive installation: its intense red, with soft and hard edges, make it disorientating and exquisite. In the 1980s and ’90s Turrell developed works that expose visitors to total darkness or isolate an individual in a contained environment. His art is now located across the globe in permanent installations in museums and private collections – including at the NGA: the Skyspace ‘Within without’ (2010) at the National Gallery of Australia is one of the most beautiful. Turrell uses a range of fluorescent, tungsten, fibre-optic and LED lights, as well as natural light.
‘Raemar pink white’ (1969) plays with our perceptions, like a large, luminescent pink canvas levitating in front of a wall. After his first sculptures using fire, Turrell began to construct projections that produce illusionistic geometric shapes. ‘Afrum (white)’, (1966), for example, appears as a hovering cube of light. He studied mathematics and perceptual psychology, and his background as a Quaker and training as a pilot also inform his practice. Since the 1960s James Turrell has made art from light. It celebrates Skyspaces, viewing chambers that affect our perception of the sky, and surveys Turrell’s major work, an ongoing project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano on the edge of the Painted Desert in Arizona.Īt Roden Crater, Turrel has created a “naked eye observatory” of multiple viewing chambers, fascinating interior spaces in themselves, from which visitors can observe not only the skies by day and night, but also the ever-changing effects of light itself.
James Turrell: a retrospective brings together projection pieces, built spaces, holograms, drawings, prints and photographs. National Gallery of Australia Director, Dr Gerard Vaughan, declares “James Turrell is one of the most fascinating artists of our time and Australians have never before seen an exhibition like this.”
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