Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery opens with inaugural exhibition featuring work by James Turrell

SANTA MONICA, CA.- Kayne Griffin Corcoran presents its inaugural exhibition of work by James Turrell. Kayne Griffin Corcoran is a new partnership between Bill Griffin, James Corcoran, and Maggie Kayne.

In 1966, Turrell began experimenting with light in his Santa Monica studio, the Mendota Hotel. By covering the windows and only allowing prescribed amounts of light from the street outside to shine through the openings, Turrell created his first light projections. Shortly thereafter, he began using halogen projectors to beam light across darkened rooms into corner spaces. From a distance the projected shapes appeared solid, but as viewers moved closer the forms revealed themselves to be nothing more than light cast against ordinary flat walls. Two Projections, Carn White (1967) and Phantom Blue (1968), will be included in this exhibition.

In the main gallery, Present Tense, a Space Division Construction from 1991, will be on view. In this work, a room is divided into two spaces by a partition wall. The space the viewer enters is lit by tungsten bulbs shining directly onto the sidewalls, while fluorescent tubes fill the partitioned space with colored light visible through a rectangular aperture. In a sense this work reverses the illusion of the projection works. Instead of a two-dimensional space alluding to three, the partitioned three-dimensional space appears to be a flat shape from a distance, but is perceived to diffuse into a three-dimensional “mist” when approached by the viewer.

Also included in the exhibition will be Yukaloo, a new Wide Glass work. In these works, Turrell adds a temporal element to his perception-altering oeuvre. Each piece consists of a grid of LEDs behind a pane of etched glass. The LEDs are individually programmed to carry out a subtle shift in color over time, similar to the deliberate but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes from late afternoon to night.

James Turrell was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. Since his first solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967 and the Stedelijk in 1976, Turrell has been the subject of over 140 solo exhibitions worldwide. He has received numerous awards in the arts, including The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1984. He currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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