James Turrell's First US Solo Show With Almine Rech Opens in Tribeca
Almine Rech opened her first gallery, in Paris in November 1989, with a James Turrell work titled Blood Lust. On November 12, 2026, her New York gallery in Tribeca opens Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, the artist's first solo exhibition with Almine Rech in the United States.
It is Turrell's thirteenth solo exhibition with the gallery, in a collaboration that now runs more than three decades. The exhibition gathers more than fifteen works, led by a new Shallow Space, new pieces from the Glassworks series and a new Cross Corner work.
Corner, plane, aperture
The Cross Corner work belongs to Turrell's oldest line. He began using light as a sculptural medium in 1966, sealing the windows of his studio in Santa Monica and experimenting with projections. In the Cross Corner Projections that followed, a precisely placed projector throws light across the corner of a dark room, where it reads as a solid object. Carn White, from 1967, is one of them.
The Shallow Space Constructions date from the late 1960s and early 1970s. With hidden light and plain gallery walls, Turrell compressed volumes of light into what look like flat planes. Raemar Pink White, from 1969, made with fluorescent light, is one of the earliest.
The Glassworks grew out of those constructions. Each is a single aperture, usually rectangular or elliptical, in which composition, light and color develop gradually over an hour or more, seen through translucent materials. The early Glassworks ran on neon. Turrell later turned to LED, which allows richer hues and a lower light level. Cockle Creek (Tasmania), an Elliptical Wide Glass from 2015, is listed as LED light, etched glass and shallow space, with a cycle of about two and a half hours.
The gallery's previous Turrell exhibition, Path Taken at Almine Rech Paris, Matignon, from October to December 2024, was built around a new Glasswork and screened Passageways, Carine Asscher's 1995 film about his work.
Light as the material
Turrell has used light as his medium since the 1960s and is a major figure of the Southern California Light and Space movement. His work runs from sculpted blocks of light that appear solid, to rooms filled with slowly modulating light, to architectural structures that frame the sky. In 2017, MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, opened Into the Light, a multi-decade retrospective housed in its Building 6, with galleries built for his installations.
He grew up in a Quaker family. In a conversation with Almine Rech recorded on a train between Brussels and Paris and published in 2005, he named the two aspects of the faith that mattered: meeting silence in the service, and turning inward to meet the light.
The sky works continue at a far larger scale. In June 2026, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark opened As Seen Below, a Skyspace 16 meters high and 40 meters in diameter that the museum counts as Turrell's 100th. Visitors reach the dome through an underground corridor, and the light inside it shifts color with the sunrise and sunset.
The building
Almine Rech opened its US flagship at 361 Broadway, at Franklin Street, on October 5, 2023. The 10,000-square-foot gallery occupies a landmarked 19th-century building renovated by the architect Shigeru Ban.
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue runs November 12, 2026 to January 30, 2027, with an opening reception on Thursday, November 12, from 6 to 8 pm. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm. Admission is free, by reservation through Eventbrite.
