James Turrell
Artist
Biography
James Turrell (b. 1943, Los Angeles) is an American artist and a major figure of the Southern California Light and Space movement. Since the 1960s he has used light itself as his medium, creating seemingly solid projections of pure light, rooms suffused with slowly shifting color, and Skyspaces whose openings frame the ever-changing sky, all of which direct attention to the act of perception. His most ambitious project, the transformation of Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert, into a vast naked-eye observatory, has been under way since the 1970s. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2013. Almine Rech organized his first gallery exhibition in Europe, in Paris in 1989.