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Artist: James Turrell

Almine Rech New York presents James Turrell’s first exhibition with the gallery in the United States. It marks the artist’s thirteenth exhibition with Almine Rech in more than three decades of collaboration.

Featuring over fifteen works, this presentation includes a new Shallow Space, as well as new pieces from the Glassworks series and a new Cross Corner work. These additions to landmark bodies of work continue Turrell’s relentless exploration of space and light, encouraging viewers to pay close attention to their own senses.

In 1989, Almine Rech organized Turrell’s first gallery exhibition in Europe, presenting a Light Piece entitled Blood Lust at her gallery in Paris. Today, after over thirty years of collaboration, this exhibition attests to the enduring relationship between the artist and the gallery, as well as Turrell’s ongoing dedication to his abiding creative watchword: perception.

Since the 1960s, Turrell has used light as his medium. A major figure of the Southern California Light and Space movement, Turrell’s work includes sculpted, seemingly solid blocks of pure light, rooms awash with slowly modulating light, and architectural structures that frame the ever-changing sky. Each piece extends the opportunity to be immersed in a contemplative, sensorial environment, directing our focus to the act of seeing itself.

On the occasion of the exhibition, we look back on a conversation between Almine Rech and James Turrell, recorded on the train between Brussels and Paris and included in Rencontres 9: James Turrell / Almine Rech. Published by Almine Rech Editions and Editions Images Modernes in 2005, the monograph traces the development of Turrell’s practice, from his early Projection Pieces to Roden Crater. In this excerpt, they discuss how Turrell’s relationship to his Quaker upbringing has evolved, and reflect on the state of American art.

Almine Rech: You were born in a Quaker family, what are the main characteristics of this religion?

James Turrell: Two aspects, first encounter silence in the service, second going inside to greet the light. This idea of group meditation...

AR: ...is very important?

JT: Yes it is very important. You can talk more or less depending on more sectarian or more liberal meetings.

AR: As a child what difference does it make being in a Quaker family?

JT: It is a strong inculcation. It depends on the meeting again, on the kind of meeting: Conservative or Orthodox.

AR: And you were in....?

JT: A more conservative form. They actually have quite long meetings; that was hard for children, to stay still from one to three hours inside the meeting house. A good meeting would go on three hours or more.

AR: And in everyday life?

JT: A little bit different, I remember you couldn’t wear zipper jeans. You had to have buttons and the buttons had cuffs over them. You wore a black wool coat and a hat. Adults had beards, a little like Orthodox Jews.

AR: Very traditional.

JT: Yes, yes

[...]

AR: Do you think the way your parents thought and practiced this religion has influenced your way of thinking, your art?

JT: There was a time when I was very much involved in it, then I came to think it was ridiculous. Now I can realize that I am more influenced by it than I thought.

AR: You mean the ethics?

JT: Well, just the whole thing. The way they think. I met a young man in Ireland who is a Quaker, Nicholas Moss. We thought we had some of the same ways of thinking about things.

AR: So now, you think this influence is coming back...?

JT: Well, I tend to be «land rich and cash poor» [laughs]. They take in strays, you know, like an old car—well that’s what I do—an old machine. They become stewards of tools, etc... They don’t like the idea of planned obsolescence. They make tools reusable, usable again.

AR: They don’t want to throw an old tool in the garbage can.

JT: In fact, they even tend to like what’s old better, because it has some strange kind of history, I mean, like a tool knows how to do what it does.
Just like the airplane. An airplane has flown a lot before, so obviously this plane knows how to fly. You assert a certain consciousness to things.

AR: You think so?

JT: Yes.

[...]

AR: Art is a space of freedom in our society, is that still true now?

JT: Art had ambition, there was a period in American art when it really did well, I was part of that. I still am but then it kind of changed, that’s a little bit discouraging.

AR: In what way do you think art has less ambition now than in the 60s?

JT: Something died after Vietnam because, the containment of communism, that was some unbridled imperialism. It changed how America thought about itself; now we need it again. You have to come back from that.
Then, more recently, art has come down to more personal ideas, no hierarchy of qualities. It is like a poet who would write on a grocery sack, a brown paper bag. The profoundness and depth are not from the scale or the quality of paper.

- Rencontres 9: James Turrell / Almine Rech, Almine Rech Éditions and Éditions Images Modernes, 2005, pp. 10-20.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)