JAMES TURRELL: PATH TAKEN

Almine Rech Paris is pleased to announce its 12th exhibition in 3 decades with James Turrell organized by the gallery, entitled “Path Taken”.

October 14 – December 21, 2024

For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell, born in Los Angeles, California in 1943, has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage the viewer with the limits and wonder of human perception. 

Turrell’s concept of a Glasswork is a unique aperture — rectangular or elliptical, horizontal or vertical, rarely some other shapes have been created — in which the work composition, light and colors, develop gradually over the course of an hour perceptible through the use of translucent materials. In the past, Turrell’s Glassworks were realized in neon, but for the last 15 years the artist has turned to LED technologies, which allow for richer hues and a lower light level, offering the artist more freedom as to which shapes, transitions, and color combinations he can include within the series. The works in this series are the result of Turrell’s research, started in the mid 1960s, on light as a material that affects perception of the human eye.

The exhibition also features Passageways, a film by Carine Asscher, France 1995. Passageways is an introduction to the work of James Turrell, inviting the viewer to delve deeper into the oeuvre and its origins in the meeting between the Hopi cosmogony and an artistic agenda.

During over twenty years of creating installations on buildings, Turrell transformed the idea of lighting, the typical way of highlighting architecture, by substituting an almost aura-like luminous emanation that occurs electronically over time in subtle variations. The Glassworks pieces came out of these explorations. Turrell has always emphasized the time of perception, but now he has added the modulation of light over time, as if measured by the rhythm of our breathing, influenced by his interest in music and dance.