James Turell

James Turrell grew up in Los Angeles in a strictly religious Quaker family without modern conveniences. At the age of 16, he obtained a pilot’s licence for powered aircraft and a year later, as a pacifist, refused to do military service, for which he was sentenced to 22 months in prison. He studied psychology and maths at Pomona College in Claremont, California. In 1966, Turrell began working on “Light Spaces” and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968. In 1973 he completed an art degree at the Graduate School in Claremont. Turrell now lives and works with his third wife Kyung Lee in Flagstaff, Arizona, and Maryland. In the 1970s, he discovered Roden Crater in Arizona, which he transformed into a light observatory. His other works include the Skyspaces, rooms with an opening in the ceiling that allow a view of the sky. He built the Celestial Vault in The Hague in 1996. In 2004, his MAKlite installation was shown at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. Other Skyspaces and light installations have been created in Spain, Salzburg, Argentina, Unna and Wolfsburg, among other places. Turrell has also designed light installations for the Dornier Museum in Friedrichshafen and the Kunsthalle Bremen. In 2013, a major retrospective of his works was organised in Los Angeles, Houston and New York. Other projects include the refurbished chapel in Berlin (2015) and the Skyspace Lech in Vorarlberg (2018). He designed the chapel “A Chapel for Luke and his Scribe Lucius the Cyrene” for the Freising Diocesan Museum in 2022.