James Turrell's 70th birthday - superb light art in Los Angeles & New York

Three roughly simultaneous exhibitions – and other smaller shows - mark the 70th birthday (May, 6) of the american light artist James Turrell.

Since end of May, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a comprehensive James Turrell retrospective. It is the first major U.S. survey of Los Angeles-native James Turrell since 1985. The exhibition features approximately fifty works tracing five decades of the artist’s career. In addition to early light projections, holograms, and an entire section devoted to his masterwork-in progress, the Roden Crater project, the exhibition features numerous immersive light installations that address our perception and how we see.

James Turrell at Gagosian Gallery, London 2010. Photo: Simon Collins

LACMA’s retrospective is complemented by concurrent, independently curated exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) (until September 22, 2013). Additional Turrell exhibitions on view this year include the Academy Art Museum, Easton (April 20—July 7, 2013); and Villa Panza, Varese, Italy (October 24, 2013—May 4, 2014).

Starting June 21, the exhibition at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will surely become a magnet for visitors. The famous rotunda will be filled with shifting natural and artificial light (until September 25, 2013). It is the first exhibition in a New York museum since 1980.

“The theme of light has preoccupied artists for centuries,” says Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA and exhibition cocurator. “No one, however, has so fully considered the ‘thing-ness’ of light itself—as well as how the experience of light reflects the wondrous and complex nature of human perception—as James Turrell has for nearly five decades.”

James Turrell next to his light wall at Bay-Adelaide Centre in Toronto. Photo: Barbara Astman

Turrell’s revolutionary use of light in art makes for an experience that is both physical and optical—requiring visitors to spend anywhere from five to twenty minutes with one artwork, often alone in a gallery or with a limited number of fellow viewers. In the mid-1960s, James Turrell was inspired by a beam of light from a slide projector while sitting in the darkened room of an undergraduate art history class at Pomona College. The sight provoked a question: what if light wasn’t the tool that enabled people to see something else but rather became the thing people look at? Thus began an inquiry that has led to a vast, prolific career.

Born in Los Angeles in 1943 to a Quaker mother and father who was a school administrator, Turrell attended Pomona College, where his studies concentrated on perceptual psychology and astronomy. In 1973 he received a Master's degree in art from Claremont Graduate School. His work is represented in numerous public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The James Turrell Museum opened in Colomé, Argentina in 2009.

James Turrell at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, 2009: Bridget's Bardo, Ganzfeld © James Turrell. Photo: ©Florian Holzherr