TO enter alone, lying on a flat bed, into the large sphere that is Turrell’s “Bindu Shards (2010) Perceptual cell”, results in a transcendent and profound experience.

Physical and temporal barriers recede as rapidly moving intensities of coloured light create imperceptible changes in brain waves that induce a state of bliss. Surrender is inevitable and the joyful effects of this completely immersive experience lasted throughout the day.

The exhibition traverses the artist’s 50-year career and includes ink jet prints, reflection holograms, aquatints, photographs and drawings that provide fascinating insight into Turrell’s projects and creative process. However, it is the installations, so unexpected and intensely dreamlike, that capture the imagination and the heart. Apart from the once-in-a-lifetime experience of “Bindu Shards”, this is most acutely experienced in “Virtuality squared” (2014) Ganzfeld, where the soaring 12-metre ceilings of the NGA accommodate the sensation of being within an amorphous, oneiric environment that goes well beyond the visual to incorporate the emotional.

Installations such as “Afrum” (1966), “Shanta ll (blue)” (1970), “Joecar (red)” 1968 and “Raemar pink white” (1969) hover, as if untethered, in discrete spaces. “After green (1993) Wedgework”, approached in darkness, manifests the eye’s extraordinary capacity to transform, incorporate or indeed reject the physicality and actuality of colour and light.

This is an ambitious and transformative exhibition, many years in the making, and many weeks in construction that has been realised through masterful collaboration between the artist, the curator Lucina Ward and NGA staff. To experience Turrell is to be transported.