Product Overview
The artists 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 museums 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 Wrights iconic architecture--its openness to nature, its graceful curves, its magnificent sense of space and light--as one of Turrells 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 installations core, daylight from the museums oculus connects the work to the outside environment. Through these interventions, Turrell rekindles the museums identity as a temple of spirit (to quote the museums 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 Turrells career. In addition to beautifully reproduced images featuring the artists early works, his magnum opus Roden Crater Project (1979 ), and documentation of Aten Reign, this volume includes essays by the shows curators, Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Carmen Gimnez, 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.
