James Turrell
«The Substance of Light»
Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (DE), 2018

Under the title «James Turrell - The Substance of Light», the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden is dedicating a solo show to the American light artist.

Anyone who immerses themselves in James Turrell's light spaces enjoys a magical experience: the colored, changing light makes the room seem endless.

Born in 1943 in Los Angeles, Turrell took an avid interest in flying at an early age. Today, he describes the skies as his studio, his material, his canvass. In the 1960s, influenced by minimal art and land art, he employed a range of techniques to give the immaterial light a physical presence.

«The Substance of Light» at the Museum Frieder Burda is an exhibition conceived in close cooperation with the artist himself. Over five decades, Turrell's work has combined conceptual thinking, science, technology and spirituality to create a unique art form: the artwork takes shape through the perception of the observer. Turrell uses immaterial, colored light to create impressions of mass and volume, spaces and objects, which can assume the form of surfaces, cubes, pyramids or tunnels.


The exhibition brings together works from Turrell's best-known series from the last decades and hitherto unseen works, along with the light sculpture Accretion Disk, which was created especially for the Frieder Burda Collection. The highlights of the show include the enormous Ganzfeld light room, which caused a sensation at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Turrell's Wedgework installations create walls and barriers of light. They suggest spatial depth but also evoke the monochrome canvasses of color field painting. A series of models, photographs and a documentary present the most important stages and works of Turrell's oeuvre, including hiss most ambitious project, the Roden Crater: during a flight in the 1970s, he noticed an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert. Since then, he has been converting it into a type of space observatory. This complex of subterranean chambers, shafts and tunnels is like a temple dedicated solely to light.

From the press text of the Museum Frieder Burda