Lifting the Veil: James Turrell Bends Light and Perspective

Description

James Turrell’s most-renowned works are, quite literally, too huge in scope to fit in a gallery. Which is why Gagosian’s Lifting the Veil combines a mix of perspective-shifting holograms and with archival plans and photographs. Among those too ambitious for display are Turrell’s Skyspaces series — individual architectural chambers designed to amplify the senses, via a light-bending aperture in the ceiling, opening onto the sky. Site plans and models also depict the American octogenarian’s magnum opus, “Roden Crater,” an incomplete naked-eye observatory housed within a volcanic cinder cone in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona, begun in 1977 but awaiting funding for completion.

What unites these large-scale projects with his gallery-sized works is Turrell’s lifelong obsession with distorting light and perception, evident in the sequence of three of his Glassworks featured in the Hong Kong exhibition. Titled Resolute, Patmos and Of One Mind, the series sees pulsing LED lights installed behind a shaped aperture in the wall. The effect is slowly changing fields of colour that at times resolve into single hues, producing alternating impressions of depth and flatness.