About the
Artist

“The unique thing about creating a Skyspace in the Maldives is that if there were ever a Skyspace at sea, the Maldives is perfectly that in the Indian ocean. I look at water as spirit, and light as that spirit which unites the vision with the eyes closed (vision in the dream state) with the light that is in the physical world. This is something that is uniquely done here in the Maldives and why I entitled the piece Amarta. Amarta is the immortal elixir, which I feel to be light.”

James Turrell

With his art career spanning five decades, James Turrell’s work is primarily an exploration of light and space. By making light the subject of the revelation, Turrell’s work challenges the very nature of how and what is perceived and, in particular, how what is perceived affects and forms the reality lived. One part meditative and another confounding, Turrell’s works heighten the viewer’s very sense of seeing and places the viewer in a realm of experience.

Residing in Flagstaff, Turrell has been working on Roden Crater, an artwork of unprecedented scale within a volcanic cinder cone in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona. Representing the culmination of the artist’s lifelong research in the field of human visual and psychological perception, Roden Crater is Turrell’s magnum opus. It is a work that, in addition to being a monument to land art, functions as a naked eye observatory of celestial and planetary events that are both predictable and continually in flux.

Turrell’s work has been recognized in celebrated art institutions across the world, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg; the National Gallery of Art in Canberra; and the Long Museum in Shanghai.

Turrell is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1984), and the National Medal of Arts (2013).