James Turrell (*1943 inLos Angeles) has been working with all of the manifestations of light since the sixties. Moving beyond the scientific investigation of optical phenomena, his works open up the dimensions of spiritual experience. The artist has been pursuing this aim since 1974, when he began transforming the Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert—into an observatory. Inside this multipartite environment, visitors can immerse themselves in the totality of light.

Turrell is currently realizing his largest installation to date in the eighteen-by-thirty-meter hall at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. This Ganzfeld Piece resembles the crater, everted and rotated ninety degrees. Thus the Wolfsburg installation provides a foretaste of Turrell’s still incomplete, epic work in Arizona. This richly illustrated publication documents, among other things, the genesis of this new work of art.

Exhibition schedule: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, October 24, 2009–April 5, 2010

Edited by Esther Barbara Kirschner, Markus Brüderlin, texts by Richard Andrews, Markus Brüderlin, Esther Barbara Kirschner, Annelie Lütgens, Peter Weber