James Turrell: A Retrospective

New edition
Exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum, 2013

For over fifty years, James Turrell (1943-) has devoted himself to exploring the (im)materiality and perception of light. Like no other artist, he succeeds in ensuring that the experience of light as an artistic medium can be experienced by both the senses and the intellect. His work is influenced by his experiences in aviation, science and psychology, and as a key player in the explosion of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s.

Both a catalogue of the Los Angeles exhibition and a monograph, this new edition of the book published in 2013 sheds light on the origins and motivations behind James Turrell's incredibly varied oeuvre, from his beginnings in Mendota's studio to his monumental work Roden Crater.

The book examines all aspects of Turrell's career, from his early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, to his installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of coloured light, to his two-dimensional experiments with holograms. It also presents an in-depth examination of Roden Crater, a specific intervention in the landscape near Flagstaff, Arizona, presented through models, plans, photographs and drawings.