James Turrell at Almine Rech New York: His First Show with the Gallery in the U.S.

Almine Rech New York will show James Turrell from November 12, 2026 to January 30, 2027 at 361 Broadway in Tribeca. It is the artist's 13th exhibition with Almine Rech over more than three decades of collaboration, and his first with the gallery in the United States. The opening reception is Thursday, November 12, from 6 to 8 pm. Entry is free and no reservation is required.

Born in Los Angeles in 1943, Turrell has used light itself as his medium since the 1960s and is a major figure of the Southern California Light and Space movement. His work takes many forms: sculpted blocks of light that seem solid, rooms washed in slowly changing color, and architecture built to frame the shifting sky. Each places the viewer in a quiet, sensory setting and turns attention to the act of seeing itself.

More than fifteen works are on view, anchored by new additions to some of his best-known bodies of work. A new Shallow Space uses a second wall built inside the room, lit from behind so light spills through narrow gaps at its edges; the wall seems to float and the real depth of the room becomes hard to read. A new Cross Corner work projects light into a corner so that it reads as a solid cube, one that resolves as you move and dissolves into plain light on the wall as you approach. New pieces from the Glassworks series round out the show; Pace Gallery has described the series as shifting planes of light that create an illusion of infinite depth.

The exhibition page features Raemar, Blue (1969). Tate, which owns the work, calls it one of the earliest and most significant of Turrell's Shallow Space Constructions: blue light glows from behind a partition, which appears to hover at the back of the gallery. More than fifty years later, the same idea returns here as new work.

The gallery's ties to Turrell go back to 1989, when Almine Rech organized his first gallery exhibition in Europe at her Paris space, presenting a Light Piece titled Blood Lust. For this show the gallery has published an excerpt of a conversation between the two, recorded on a train between Brussels and Paris and printed in Rencontres 9: James Turrell / Almine Rech (2005).

In it Turrell talks about his Quaker upbringing, describing the service as encountering silence and going inside to greet the light. He recalls how hard it was as a child to sit still through meetings of one to three hours, and says that after once finding it all ridiculous, he now sees he was more influenced by it than he thought. He also describes the Quaker habit of keeping old tools and machines in use, noting that a tool knows how to do what it does. Read next to his dark rooms of light, the parallel with a silent meeting that waits for the light is hard to miss.

New Yorkers can already experience Turrell at MoMA PS1 in Queens, where Meeting (1986), a Skyspace with a rectangular opening to the sky, is on permanent view. In 2013 his Aten Reign filled the Guggenheim rotunda with changing color. His largest project, Roden Crater, under way since 1979, turns a dormant volcanic cinder cone in Arizona into a naked-eye observatory.

In Japan, his works are on permanent view at the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima, including Open Field and Open Sky; at the House of Light in Tokamachi, Niigata, where visitors can stay overnight; and at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, home to Blue Planet Sky.

Light works are hard to capture in photographs, and the time your eyes need to adjust is part of the piece. Give each work a few unhurried minutes. The gallery sits on Broadway in Tribeca, an easy walk from SoHo and Chinatown.