Alison de Lima Greene

The only comprehensive volume on James Turrell is back in print—from early prints and light projections to his monumental Roden Crater project This definitive book illuminates the origins and motivations of James Turrell’s incredibly diverse and exciting body of work—from his Mendota studio days to his monumental work-in-progress Roden Crater. Whether projecting shapes on a flat wall or into the corner of a gallery space, Turrell is perpetually asking us to "go inside and greet the light"—evoking his Quaker upbringing. In fact, all of Turrell’s work has been influenced by his life experiences with aviation, science and psychology, and as a key player in Los Angeles’ exploding art scene of the 1960s. Enhanced by thoughtful essays and an illuminating interview with the artist, this monograph explores every aspect of Turrell’s career—from his early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, through his installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, to two-dimensional experiments with holograms. It also features an in-depth look at Roden Crater, a site-specific intervention into the landscape near Flagstaff, Arizona, which is presented through models, plans, photographs and drawings. Fans of this highly influential artist will find much to savor in this wide-ranging and beautiful book, featuring specially commissioned photography by Florian Holzherr. As an undergraduate, James Turrell (born 1943) studied psychology and mathematics, transitioning to art only at MFA level. The recipient of several prestigious awards, including Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona.

An artist whose work evokes both memory and the "gaps, sinkholes, and other chasms" found in our experiences, Gael Stack is one of the most accomplished American painters working today. Her large canvases and smaller drawings use fragments of words and images, often layered over one another like a palimpsest, to create a visual language that explores the past's implacable hold on the present, with what is unknown and unspoken occasionally poking through. Serendipitous elements of graciousness and optimism also distinguish her recent work.Gael Stack is the first retrospective monograph on the artist's career, which has spanned four decades. It features a catalog of some one hundred works reproduced in full-color, full-page plates. Accompanying the images are essays by Raphael Rubinstein and Alison de Lima Greene, who discuss Stack's work in the context of world art. Rubinstein likens her paintings to Freud's "mystic writing-pad," a surface layer that can be endlessly written upon, erased, and refilled, while the underlying tablet retains traces of all that has been written-an apt metaphor for the workings of perception and memory. Greene also reflects on the theme of memory in Stack's art, particularly the ways in which memory can evolve into forgetfulness and cognizance can become ignorance. Lists of selected exhibitions and public collections in which her work has been featured and a bibliography complete this authoritative survey of Stack's career.