London’s burgeoning contemporary art scene has endowed the East End with an apparently limitless meterage of white wall. However, its newest contender, The Louise T. Blouin Foundation, which opened last week, seeks to stretch its geography back across the city.

Within an imposing former coachworks, radically restructured by Borgas Dance Architects, their opening exhibition, James Turrell, A Life in Light, declares the scale of the Foundation’s ambition. The last time this artist was seen in London was at the grand, Foster designed, Albion Gallery. This building joins it as probably one of the few private spaces capable of showing such work. The current exhibition is broad in its aim, encompassing, but moving beyond the early Projection Works featured at Albion and attempting to offer a glimpse, both of the variety of Turrell’s visual concerns and the arc of his career to date.

On the ground floor, enclosures house Fastnet, one of his Space Division series, alongside two examples of the aforementioned Projection Works. These will change during the course of the exhibition, but perhaps the most effective currently is Shanta (1968),an apparently floating, rectilinear volume of brilliant red light. Although familiar, these works remain immensely powerful. Turrell describes them as ‘trying to make a thingness of light’ and indeed they seem to exist in a state just outside the material…almost forms. Perhaps it is the capturing of this perpetual, shimmering moment of emergant volume that explains why architects like them so much.

With Fastnet (1992), form and vibrant colour recede, leaving behind what is almost an after-image. Within a darkened space, what comes to resemble the ghost of an Yves Klein painting emerges as ones eyes adjust. On walking forward it recedes again, dissolving into apparently limitless blue - absence rather than presence. This curatorial counterpoint with the Projections is effective, although one could suggest that the gallery itself does not quite manage to live up to Turrell’s edict that ‘the surfaces of the spaces that contain the work have to be so perfect as to be invisible’. For the pieces on the upper floor, this remains an issue.

Here the ceiling is low, although in the largest space, character is achieved through a deep linear cut of rooflight. This works well for First Light, twenty exquisite, monochrome aquatints, which illustrate both constructed and possible Projection Works. Again, these shift from presence to absence, the glowing projections transformed into reflection of light off white paper. However, the ceiling makes the scale of the remaining rooms almost domestic. Whilst this seems appropriate in relation to the flickering, TV like, aperture of Pancho (2000), for The Light Underneath (2006), one of the artist’s recent Tall Glass pieces, the intimacy of the space initially feels intrusive. This is eventually forgotten, as the work’s mesmerising quality draws you in. Here, Turrell utilises sophisticated LED technology in a manner which references his early artistic influences, forming a diffuse, unfocused, surface of subtle shifting colour - sometimes Rothko, sometimes Turner, always beautiful.

This piece alone might justify the rather expensive ticket, but one can experience the final work for free – the transformation of the building’s eighty windows into a permanent Turrell installation. From the Mendota Hotel to Roden Crater, those works of his which are situated ‘within the world’ have always seemed the most profound…here I am less certain. This rotating spectrum of coloured light literally makes the Foundation’s mark upon the city, but I will leave you to judge whether it is sensitively calibrated with respect to the social housing and light industry in whose immediate proximity they have chosen to make their home.