Kanye West Once Said He Wanted to Live Inside a James Turrell Artwork. Now the Artist Just Designed Him a New Home as a Birthday Present

Ever since rapper and fashion mogul Kanye West visited Naoshima,
the Tadao Ando-designed Japanese “art island” that’s home to three
James Turrell installations, in 2018, he’s wanted to live inside
the light-and-space artist’s work—literally.

Now, that dream may become a reality.

“Turrell designed an entire home and gave it to me on my
birthday” last year, West said in a recent interview
with GQ. He
recalled his first reaction to the artist’s work: “I said, ‘We need
to live in a Turrell.’”

Last June, West celebrated his 42nd birthday with the artist at
Turrell’s Roden Crater, the artist’s
monumental land art project in Arizona’s Painted Desert. When
Turrell presented West with the architectural sketch, West’s
interior designer Axel Vervoordt, who was also in attendance,
was skeptical.

“Axel was saying that James Turrell’s spaces are too pure for us
human beings to live in,” West recalled. “I told Axel, ‘You’re not
going to bully me on my birthday.’”

West and Turrell have grown close since the rapper and
producer donated $10
million to fund the completion of Roden
Crater last January. Turrell purchased the dormant
volcano in 1979 and has spent the subsequent decades transforming
it into a solar observatory. But it isn’t yet open to the
public, which made it all the more exciting when West released
Jesus Is King, an
IMAX film shot inside the installation, to promote his album of
the same name, last fall.

The interview with GQ took place across multiple
days and locations, including at West Lake Ranch, which the
musician recently purchased outside of Cody, Wyoming. The evolving
campus, which will feature a building by Italian architect Claudio
Silvestrin, as well as projects by Turrell and Vervoordt, is the
planned headquarters for West’s futuristic-looking domed structures that he
plans to use to house low-income and homeless people.

The magazine also paid a visit to West’s Los Angeles home, where
readers learn he owns a lens-shaped white fiberglass sculpture by
Anish Kapoor. “It’s an amazing piece,” West said. “And now we’re
gonna live in one.”

West, whose own high-school artwork recently made headlines when
it was appraised for upwards of
$20,000 on Antiques Roadshow, and who once declared his Twitter
account a work of contemporary art, also had yet another grand
pronouncement about his creative endeavors: “Everything I’ve ever
done has been an art piece, because I’m an artist.”

The post Kanye West Once Said He Wanted to Live Inside a
James Turrell Artwork. Now the Artist Just Designed Him a New Home
as a Birthday Present appeared first on artnet News.