“I’ve always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream. Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people with auras and things like that […] We don’t normally see light like that.”ⁱ

—James Turrell

A culmination of James Turrell’s lifelong pursuit of cultivating the sensory experience of light, Ariel, 2022, is emblematic of the artist’s unique ability to reconfigure space and perception. The present work belongs to the artist’s ongoing Glass Series, which expands on his six-decade exploration of light and perception through the increasingly sophisticated capacities of emerging technologies. Debuted in 2001, the series incorporates LED lighting and computer programming—tools that, according to Turrell, are “changing the possibilities” of his recent work.ⁱⁱ

A large diamond-shaped composition rendered in vibrant colors, Ariel was first exhibited in Confidences, a focused paring of new works by Turrell at Gagosian’s rue de Ponthieu gallery in 2023. Shown alongside Jeu, 2022—a medium, ellipse-shaped work in blush hues—Ariel was installed within a custom-built environment designed to bring the two works into visual and spatial dialogue. The exhibition offered a quietly immersive experience, emphasizing subtle differences in scale, form, and chromatic intensity. Presented in tandem with exhibitions featuring new work by Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, and Richard Serra across Gagosian’s Paris locations, Confidences situated Turrell’s luminous works within a broader, intergenerational discourse on perception, materiality, and the experience of space.

Hypnotic and meditative, the present work is illuminated by a computer program that animates vibrant illuminations on a diamond-shaped fabric scrim, yielding a more dynamic experience of light. Throughout the duration of the work’s 1 hour and 52-minute run time, Ariel projects diffuse light that swells and contracts in vibrant hues, casting an auric glow. Facilitated by the artist’s groundbreaking work with computer programming, Turrell offers a more intense and immediate experience with color. Ariel pulses with golden, fuchsia, emerald, and crimson beams that dissolve into each other as the program runs. The vivid permutations reflect the artist’s deep understanding of color theory in schemas that recall the schemas of Josef Alber’s geometric abstractions—a profound influence on the artist’s practice. As the shifting colors hypnotically recede, the work adopts a meditative quality that grounds its spectator in the act of viewing—a sensation aligned with Turrell’s greater artistic aim to unveil the physical characteristics of light, or in the words of artist, “thingness of light itself.”ⁱⁱⁱ

The title of the work, Ariel, is a reference to the archangel of the natural world, who appears in Gnostic texts as an overseer of the physical realm. Though the present work is distinctly non-narrative, this allusion seems to gesture at Turrell’s fascination with religion and spirituality. Across his oeuvre, the artist has sourced material from a spectrum of belief systems. In the artist’s recent Glass Series works, Turrell’s engagement with spiritual themes is prominent. The art historian and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) director Michael Govan remarked in “The Question Concerning Technology,” the experience of viewing a Glass Series installation to “the similar meditative states that Buddhist monks spend years cultivating.”^iv The quality is particularly pronounced in the present work, which despite not overtly referencing a belief system, imbues its environment with otherworldly luminescence that verges on the sublime. 

“Indeed, Turrell’s exploration of the latest digital and light technologies, combined with an ever more sophisticated understanding of the brain and the eye, often leads him back—albeit through new forms—to his earliest ideas in working in light and perception.”

—Michael Govan

Enhanced by newer technologies, Ariel marks a return to the artist’s earliest ideas surrounding light and space. With its portal-like radials of light, the piece is reminiscent the artist’s initial investigations into the “architecture of space created with light” first explored in the artist’s early experiments with light in the highly sought-after Shallow Space Constructions works of late 1960s and early 1970s.^v Developed during his tenure at LACMA’s Art and Technology program, in this body of work Turrell developed a light source that emanated from behind geometric openings cut into architectural partitions. The resulting installations both flooded the viewing space with light and obliterated all shadow, compressing the viewer’s understanding of depth and flatness. 

The effect of the Shallow Space Constructions was both grounding and euphoric — qualities also present in Ariel, though here they are delivered with greater precision and intensity. As art historian Craig Adcock notes, “The kind of space created by the Shallow Space Constructions is perhaps even more abstract [than] the obscurely remembered space of dreams. It is also more real. The quality of the light reveals what is actually there, but what is actually there is unfamiliar.”^vi Ariel expounds on Turrell’s initial investigations of flatness and dimensionality with a greater intensity. The crisp, prismatic frame evokes Turrell’s angular Shallow Space partitions, collapsing spatial boundaries and intensifying the perception of depth within the fabric scrim. In this way, Ariel is a superb expression of Turrell’s artistic ability to transfigure space and extract potent sensory experiences through the medium of light. 

ⁱ James Turrell, quoted in James Turrell: A Retrospective, Michael Gowan and Christine Y. Yim eds., Los Angeles, 2013, p. 263.
ⁱⁱ James Turrell, quoted in Chistine Y. Yim, “James Turrell: A Life in Art,” in James Turrell: A Retrospective, Michael Gowan and Christine Y. Yim eds., Los Angeles, 2013, p. 44.
ⁱⁱⁱJames Turrell quoted in Edward Lifson, “James Turrell Experiments With The ‘Thingness Of Light Itself,” NPR, September 7, 2013, online.
^iv Michael Gowen, “The Question Concerning Technology” in James Turrell: A Retrospective, Michael Gowan and Christine Y. Yim eds., Los Angeles, 2013, p. 274.
^v James Turrell quoted in Michael Govan, “James Turrell,” Interview Magazine, May 23, 2011, online.
^vi James Turrell: A Retrospective, Michael Gowan and Christine Y. Yim eds., Los Angeles, 2013, p. 77.