JAMES TURRELL: AT ONE
Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by James Turrell at the Le Bourget gallery.
October 14, 2024 – Summer 2025
Since the 1960s, Turrell has worked with perceptual phenomena ranging from sensory deprivation to optical effects. In 1966, he began using planes of light in relation to architectural interiors, launching an ongoing manipulation of built and natural environments. Turrell continues to use light as his primary material to work with the medium of perception, creating formally simple projects that employ new technologies to examine the limits of seeing, sometimes inducing meditative states.
The main space on the Le Bourget gallery’s ground floor houses “Ganzfeld”, “All Clear”. Viewers enter a rounded, all-white pavilion within which they are bathed with colored light generated by an LED screen and backlighting. The lack of corners and edges in the space further contributes to a loss of orientation. The series is named for the Ganzfeld Effect, which can occur when an absence of depth, shape, and distance indicators causes the brain to mistake visual noise for tangible information.
Turrell’s work evokes the disorienting experiences of skiing in whiteout conditions, ascending into enveloping clouds while flying, or diving into the void of the deep ocean. The landscape alluded to is comparable to outer space, where all horizons are lost, and the abstraction of Boolean algebra. Echoes of such experiences occur when space is dissolved ephemerally in the “Ganzfeld” piece, “All Clear”. This occurs at timed intervals to prevent the disorientation from becoming overwhelming. Also on the gallery’s ground floor is “Either Or”, a new installation in the “Wedgework” series. Here, projected light interacts with reflective surfaces, lending it a physical “thingness” through which the room’s interior architecture appears to expand beyond its physical limits.
Alongside these works, archival materials related to “Roden Crater” dating from 1982 to 2024 are on view, along with blueprints, holograms, models, photographs, a three-dimensional photo viewer, and two lap desks that were used by Turrell throughout the 1980s. “Roden Crater” is a vast artwork built into a volcanic cinder cone in the landscape of the Painted Desert of Northern Arizona to form a nakedeye observatory for the contemplation of the light and space of the sky.