James Turrell valuation
Uses light itself as the material, and has been reshaping an Arizona volcano since 1977.
James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943, took a degree in perceptual psychology, and is a Quaker and a pilot — all three matter.
What a work by James Turrell is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943, took a degree in perceptual psychology, and is a Quaker and a pilot — all three matter. He works with light as a physical substance rather than as illumination: projections that appear to be solid objects, Ganzfeld rooms in which the eye loses any surface to focus on, and the Skyspaces, chambers with an aperture cut to the sky so that the sky reads as a plane. Since 1977 he has been converting Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Painted Desert, into a naked-eye observatory. He was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1984.
The major works are architecture and are commissioned rather than traded — a Skyspace is built into a building and cannot be moved. What circulates is a narrower field: editioned light works and glass pieces with their controllers and technical specification, holograms, prints and the aquatint portfolios such as Deep Sky and First Light, which are well documented and are the accessible part of the output. Electronic works carry component obsolescence questions, and the installation specification, lighting programme and calibration form part of the work.
Skyspaces in Britain, and First Light
Several Skyspaces can be visited in Britain: Cat Cairn, the Kielder Skyspace in Northumberland, completed in 2000; Seldom Seen at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, from 2004; the Deer Shelter Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, made in 2006 inside an old deer shelter and commissioned by the Art Fund; and Tewlwolow Kernow, an underground chamber at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens near Penzance, from 2013. They are fixed to their sites and do not come to market.
Turrell has called First Light his most important printmaking project. It is a portfolio of twenty aquatints published by Peter Blum Edition in New York in 1989 and 1990 and printed in Zurich by Peter Kneubühler, each sheet picturing one of his projected-light works of the 1960s as a shape of light on a wall or in a corner. Single sheets are often sold separately, and the title of the sheet and its place in the portfolio identify it.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
