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
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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.
The Mendota Hotel, Sam Francis and the Sky Pesher lights
Turrell's father was an aeronautical engineer and his mother had trained as a doctor. An exhibition of Thomas Wilfred's light works, seen at fifteen, was an early prompt, and for years he restored antique aeroplanes to pay for his art. After Pomona, where his degree in perceptual psychology took in the Ganzfeld effect, he began making light projections in 1966 in his studio in the former Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica, covering the windows and letting in measured amounts of street light, the start of the Mendota Stoppages of 1969 to 1974.
In 1968 he joined the Los Angeles County Museum's Art and Technology Program with Robert Irwin and the psychologist Edward Wortz, and in 1969 he made sky drawings with Sam Francis using coloured skywriting smoke. His Quaker Skyspaces include the Live Oak Meeting House, built for the Society of Friends, and Greet the Light at the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting in Philadelphia, of 2013. When the Walker Art Center restored Sky Pesher in 2023, the original cold-cathode tubes, by then almost impossible to replace, were converted to LEDs in consultation with Turrell.
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