Text Quotes on the Tall Glass Series

Turrell’s digitally-generated Tall Glass Piece dates from the computer age.

The American employs the latest LED technology for his works. 14,400 red, yellow, green, blue, and white light-emitting diodes are mounted on a panel behind an approximately 2x 3 meter matte, etched sheet of glass. Only the panel of glass is visible to the viewer, not the surfaces on which the instruments are mounted. The LEDs are controlled by a computer so that the light traverses through the entire color spectrum in a gradual flow.

The programmed color spectrum of Spinther requires 200 minutes to complete an entire cycle.

The color gradient appears as an animated atmospheric painting, as “animated abstractions of light." The colors drift from the center to the edges.

At times, a single color blue, green, or purple floods the panel and then implodes into a differently colored core. A new aura-like ring is formed that radiates outwards in the gradations of color and so forth. The sheet of glass is set behind a cutout section of wall, but is not level with it. A small gap remains, a narrow spatial zone that provides an additional dimension of depth.

Each of the colors that dominate in turn radiates out over the sharp edges of the high rectangular opening into the space, contaminating the walls and floor.

As a picture with frayed zones of color, the Tall Glass Piece recalls Mark Rothko’s Color Field Painting. In 2006, Ulrike Gehring examined the general links between Rothko and Turrell, without, however, being able to take this group of works from 2007 into consideration. But her appraisal is still valid for Tall Glass Pieces: “lf one follows the development and emancipation of light from a functional material to an autonomous art media after 1950, the transition from Rothko to Turrell marks a decisive turn insofar as their light pictures represent the hinge between the traditional painted picture and modernistic, real Spatial light ... Rothko liberated naturalistic pictorial light from its functional obligations and employed it as abstract color light. By making use of light . . . as an autonomous pictorial means, he decisively paved the way for subsequent artists Such as Turrell or Flavin. With its two-fold characteristic as a picture and as an animate object, the With its two-fold characteristic as a picture and as an animate object, the Tall Glass Piece ls furthermore related to kinetic art of the nineteen sixties, particularly the Italian movement.” The viewer stands or moves in front of Spinther like in front of a painting. He approaches it, recognizes the intermediate space between the wall and the pane of glass, and moves back and forth until he finds the ideal vantage point for himself from which he can best follow the light moving inwardly or outwardly, but he cannot influence it.

Source: »James Turrell: The Wolfsburg Project« Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,

Germany, 2009