Please join us for these special exhibition walkthroughs. We will begin at David Kordansky Gallery to see Torbjørn Rødland's exhibition Backlit Rainbow. We will then walk over to Kanye Griffin Corcoran Gallery to view their exhibition of new and historic work by James Turrell.

Over the last twenty years, the Norwegian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Torbjørn Rødland has produced a body of work remarkable for its cultural reach, its awareness of photographic history and technique, and its ability to press up against psychological, moral, and philosophical boundaries. Among the works on view in Backlit Rainbow is a group of photographs of young men that exemplifies the multi-faceted nature of Rødland’s project. Inspired by a subset of Japanese manga cartoons known as Boys’ Love, they depict homoerotic tableaux with varying degrees of sexual tension. Subtle and not-so-subtle homoerotic subtexts can be found throughout the show–rainbow-colored objects appear in two pictures, for example–and its title underscores the theme.

In the of Glass Works and Autonomous Structures from James Turrell, four newly created Glass works will be installed each with their own scale, shape and experience of color. Each Glass is a unique composition, in which hundreds of vivid combinations of colors seep into and against each other as they slowly shift over time. This wall-cavity filled with color advances the lineage of abstract art, particularly calling to mind Mark Rothko’s Color Field paintings or Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, which for Turrell “brought color out of darkness.” In implicating the viewer in the temporal experience of color within the physical and perceptual experience, Turrell turns light into a powerful substance. The Autonomous Structures evolved from Turrell’s interest in creating unique architectural spaces designed for shaping perception. In his words, these spaces “are just containers for the light; the art is in the experience of the viewer.” This exhibition will present several of the artist’s models for these structures, cast in smooth, undecorated plaster.

Torbjørn Rødland and James Turrell