James Turrell. Aten Reign.

A museum turned toward the sky

The rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is a spiral ramp designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, coiling around an empty centre with a skylight at the top. Visitors usually walk up and look down. Paintings hang along the wall; the void in the middle is just where the gaze passes through.

In the summer of 2013, from 21 June to 25 September, James Turrell reversed that direction. Aten Reign made the void itself the work. Visitors stood on the ground floor and looked up.

Above them hung a series of nested elliptical rings, each a different tone, stepping up toward the skylight. Artificial light and daylight mixed in a single volume. The colour shifted slowly from one tone to the next, with no clear point of arrival.

The museum described Aten Reign as one of the most dramatic transformations the building had ever seen. Yet nothing was placed in that space to be looked at. What was on view was the air and the light already there.

Skyspace and crater

Turrell has worked with light since the late 1960s. One of his best known forms is the Skyspace: a room with an opening in the ceiling, where people sit and watch a piece of sky cut cleanly by the frame. The sky stops being a backdrop. It becomes a plane of colour that seems almost within reach.

The Guggenheim presented Aten Reign as a reading of Wright's architecture as a Skyspace. Its openness to nature, its curves, its sense of space were all kept; only the way of looking changed.

The work also points to Turrell's largest project, Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert that he began shaping in 1979 into an observatory for the naked eye. That project is still open. Aten Reign reads like a small version of it, set inside a building in the middle of a city.

The name Aten recalls the sun disc worshipped in ancient Egypt. A god without a human form, only a ring of light. Turrell's work is the same: a ring of light with nothing at its centre.

Three exhibitions in one summer

This was Turrell's first exhibition in a New York museum since 1980. Alongside Aten Reign in the rotunda, works from other periods of his career were shown in the Tower Level galleries as a counterpoint.

The show was curated by Carmen Giménez and Nat Trotman and organised with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. That summer, three museums in three cities held three major Turrell exhibitions.

In each, the question was nearly the same: if you remove painting, sculpture, frame and plinth, what is left to look at? Turrell's answer is looking itself.

Seeing yourself see

In Aten Reign the eye has nothing to hold on to. No sharp edges, no object, no distance easy to judge. The colour seems to hover just in front of you, though it is several floors away.

After a while you are no longer sure what you see. Is this colour from the lamps or the sky? Is that ring near or far? The uncertainty is the material. Turrell does not tell a story about light. He lets viewers notice how their own eyes build an image.

That is why the work needs time. At a glance it is a beautiful ceiling. Looked at for longer, it becomes a question about perception. People left the rotunda with a small new habit: looking up, and paying attention to the space overhead.

When the exhibition closed, the rings came down and the building returned to itself. But the void at its centre is hard to see as empty after that. Anyone who stood under Aten Reign knows it is always full, only full of something the eye rarely stops for. For another artist of the same generation who works with natural light, read Robert Irwin and untitled (dawn to dusk).