Pace Prints is pleased to announce James Turrell: Aten Reign, on view February 3 – March 19, 2022, in the 4th floor Project Room at 521 West 26th Street.
Please note that this exhibition has been extended through May 7, 2022.
James Turrell is known for installations that explore the manipulation of light, from projections and sensory deprivation to color fields and site-specific interventions. Turrell encourages the viewer to become aware of the function of their own senses, and experience light as a tangible element.
This exhibition features five editions by the artist, published by Pace Prints over a two-year period. Each of these editions draw inspiration from Turrell’s 2013 installation Aten Reign, a site-specific commission for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which transformed Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda into a meditative project that the artist referred to as an "architecture of space created with light."
Turrell’s first edition with Pace Prints, Suite from Aten Reign (2014), is a set of three Ukiyo-e woodcuts that are hand-carved and printed using fourteen colors, twelve woodblocks, and one metal plate. A complementary set of three etchings titled Suite from Aten Reign (2014) utilizes aquatint for its transitional light effects. Alongside these two sets features a large-scale archival pigment print, Aten Reign (2015), which vibrates a spectrum of blue and purple hues. The most recent published editions are From Aten Reign (2015/2016). These two, intensely luminous, Ukiyo-e woodcuts conclude the series, challenging the limits of translating light through printed ink. In Turrell’s words, “There are major differences between color in light and color off of a page. The triumphant job of the printers is to get the sense of light and color that comes out of the paper like it does with the light.”
James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943. He studied psychology and mathematics at Pomona College before receiving his MFA from Claremont Graduate University, becoming a key figure in the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. Turrell is the recipient of numerous awards, including The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1984 and the 2013 National Medal of Arts and has had major retrospectives in museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
