Afrum II, Blue

The relationship between light, color, and space is a key theme in the work of the American artist James Turrell. His color spaces create effects between space and color achieved by means of light, and open up new ways of seeing. What we see is a space barely comparable with anything familiar, an objectless, spatio-physical “coloredness” whose intensity seems nonetheless to contain everything: texture, materiality, density, and contours. And precisely because viewers are initially uncertain as to what they see, looking at the work becomes an experience of the act of seeing itself. Only on closer inspection does it become clear that we are looking not at a body or a light projection, but at an opening into another brightly lit space. The lucid geometry in "Afrum II" puts viewers in the role of an activated co-constructor: in the process of contemplation, our perceptive abilities are successively expanded. Turrell makes use of programmatic approaches from minimal and conceptual art. These include the reduction of artworks to primary forms, insights from the psychology of perception, and notions of the immateriality of art without objects as an essentially spiritual and intellectual energy and activity.