For the 2020 edition of Frieze Los Angeles, Pace Gallery and Kayne Griffin Corcoran will co-present an immersive exhibition of work by James Turrell across both galleries’ art fair booths.
James Turrell’s installations draw us closer to the presence of light and its transformation of our perception of space. The works in this presentation vary in scale, shape and color, and are developed from his Glass works begun in 2006. Each Glass work is a unique composition, incorporating a temporal element in which hundreds of vivid combinations of colors seep into each other as they slowly shift over time. Together, the works create an immersive and changing light-filled environment and a place for meditation, introspection, and awe. The color filled apertures advance the lineage of abstract art, building on the tenets of Mark Rothko’s Color Field paintings or Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, which for Turrell “brought color out of darkness.” In implicating the viewer in the temporal experience of color within the physical and perceptual experience, Turrell turns light into a powerful substance.
The art fair presentation is conceived to further the ongoing crowdsourcing and awareness-raising efforts for Turrell’s magnum opus, the Roden Crater project. Located in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona, Roden Crater is a monumental artwork created within a volcanic cinder. Representing the culmination of the artist’s lifelong research in the field of human visual and psychological perception, Roden Crater is a gateway to the contemplation of light, time, and landscape.
Since its inception, Turrell and has received widespread and high-profile support from corporations and foundations. Roden Crater counts DIA Art Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts among its Founding Donors. Pace and Kayne Griffin Corcoran will use the occasion of Frieze Los Angeles to further engage the West Coast community with Roden Crater through an education campaign on the project and by encouraging individual contributions.
Marc Glimcher, President and CEO of Pace Gallery, comments, “Seeing the completion of Roden Crater within Turrell’s lifetime is a long-held dream we all share. He has been working towards the realization of this seminal work for decades, and the end is ever closer. However modest the donation, every individual has the power to make it happen and to become part of the Roden Crater story. It’s a project close to my heart that, once open to the public, will truly illustrate the impact art can have on humanity.”
Maggie Kayne, founding partner of Kayne Griffin Corcoran, comments, “The Roden Crater is arguably the defining public arts project of our lifetime. It is impossible to describe in words the scale and ambition of James’ vision and the transcendent sensory experience one has when encountering this work. James has dedicated 50 years of his life to realizing this incredible phenomenon and its completion and legacy will last for centuries to come.”
Consider becoming a Friend of Roden Crater at http://rodencrater.com/support/
In parallel with the Los Angeles presentation, a solo exhibition by James Turrell is on view at Pace Gallery in London through March 27, 2020. Additionally, a survey exhibition of Turrell’s work entitled Passages of Light is currently on view at Museo Jumex in Mexico City through March 29, 2020.
James Turrell (b. 1943, Los Angeles, California), associated with the Light and Space movement of the 1960s, has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed perceptual art, investigating the materiality of light. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with light, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. These interactions became the foundation for Turrell’s oeuvre. Since his earliest Projection Pieces (1966–69), his exploration has expanded through various series, including Skyspaces (1974–), Ganzfelds (1976–), and perhaps most notably, his Roden Crater Project (1977–) near Flagstaff, Arizona. His practice has equally materialized in small-scale works, including architectural models, holograms, and works on paper.
Roden Crater takes its place within the tradition of American landscape art that began in the 1960s, requiring a journey to visit the work in the remote desert with truly dark night skies. While minimally invasive to the external natural landscape, internally the red and black cinder has been transformed into special engineered spaces where the cycles of geologic and celestial time can be directly experienced. It will constitute a truly culminating phenomenon in world art.
Turrell’s immersive work with how we see light in varying contexts, both natural and created, led him to conceive an artwork so remote from manmade distractions, and at a high altitude so naturally conducive to unlimited sightlines of the vast sky, that it could provide a singular experience. After an extensive search, he found his ideal conditions at Roden Crater. Since acquiring the dormant cinder cone in 1977, Turrell has fashioned Roden Crater into a site containing tunnels and apertures that open onto pristine skies, capturing light directly from the sun in daylight hours, and the planets and stars at night. Indeed it is more akin to the communally developed sites of ancient Incas, than to the conceptions of any individual one can think of in modern times.
Roden Crater is the magnum opus of James Turrell’s career, a work that, besides being a monument to land art, functions as a naked eye observatory of earthly and celestial events that are both predictable and continually in flux. Constructed to last for centuries to come, Roden Crater links the physical and the ephemeral, the objective with the subjective, in a transformative sensory experience.
The first major phase of construction included the movement of over 1.3 million cubic yards of earth to shape the Crater Bowl and the construction of the 854’ East Tunnel. Six spaces were completed, including two of the most difficult, the shaping of the Crater Bowl and the Alpha (East) Tunnel. The Sun | Moon Chamber, East Portal, and the Crater’s Eye, are joined by the Alpha (East) Tunnel and a connecting tunnel to the Crater Bowl. When complete, the project will contain 21 viewing spaces and six tunnels.
Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Under the leadership of President and CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace is a vital force within the art world and plays a critical role in shaping the history, creation, and engagement with modern and contemporary art. Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy for vibrant and dedicated relationships with renowned artists. As the gallery approaches the start of its seventh decade, Pace’s mission continues to be inspired by our drive to support the world’s most influential and innovative artists and to share their visionary work with people around the world. Pace advances this mission through its dynamic global program, comprising ambitious exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, and curatorial research and writing. Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide: two galleries in New York — including its newly opened headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 508/510 West 25th Street — as well as galleries in Palo Alto, London, Geneva, Hong Kong, and Seoul.
Kayne Griffin Corcoran is a Los Angeles based art gallery representing established and emerging contemporary artists with a focus on the aesthetics, theories, and practices that have defined the Southern California art scene from the postwar era to the present. Informed by the philosophies of three generations, the gallery was founded in 2012 by partners Maggie Kayne, Bill Griffin and James Corcoran and works collaboratively with internationally recognized institutions and other commercial galleries to promote their artists to a global audience via carefully curated solo and group exhibitions and through participation in leading art fairs worldwide The gallery is also committed to working with artists and outside curators to stage historical and group exhibitions designed to connect the program to a broader art historical dialogue. The gallery also activities including the design and production of artists’ books, monographs, and exhibition catalogues.