Since the 1960s, visionary American artist James Turrell has been laser-focused on the innate powers of pure, natural light, and how it interacts and interplays with space and colour in large scale. To engage with Turrell’s work, particularly the site-specific installations outside of the gallery environment, is often to look up towards the heavens while enclosed in a contemplative and luminous chamber-like space.
‘I want light itself to be the revelation.’
These observatory-style enclosures, known as Skyspaces, of which there are almost 100 worldwide, often centre the dome shape, in acknowledgement of how its pure form is inextricably linked with the wonders of light. Turrell has said that ‘I want light itself to be the revelation’ – and the ethereal, celestial dome acts as a kind of conduit for this.
Turrell’s first ‘stupa’ dome-based work was Three Gems, a Skyspace within the grounds of San Francisco’s de Young Museum, which was commissioned by the museum for its Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden. From the position of a stone bench that wraps around the wall of a subterranean cylindrical space, the viewer looks up to the sky through an oculus, as the day’s shifting light and weather transforms colour perception.
Deeply fascinated by the celestial world, Turrell nods to the phenomena of the cosmos in the titles of his works; such as his recent ‘Constellation’ series, which, unlike his Skyspaces, is smaller in scale and usually installed in galleries. In the Hague, there is ‘Celestial Vault’, a 40-metre long artificial crater which encourages people to observe the sky and note how it also forms a vault shape.
‘Like Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, two of my art heroines, I found my source in the Southwest desert.’
His most ambitious attempt to capture the omniscience of the cosmic, by far, is the Roden Crater in Arizona. A 50-year project – and counting – the Roden Crater is a vast sky observatory built into a 400,000-year-old extinct volcano, containing many different Skyspaces and light-bathed tunnels. In a rare interview, the 81-year-old told Art Basel; ‘Like Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, two of my art heroines, I found my source in the Southwest desert.’
Three Gems Skyscape photographs courtesy of Gary Sexton/De Young Museum
Roden Crater photographs courtesy of Florian Holzherr/James Turrell