James Turrell at the Guggenheim

The Guggenheim currently has up James Turrell's first exhibition in a New York museum since 1980. Although those of us in Chicago may not have a chance to go and see the work in person, it's installation photographs are breathtaking.

Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker describes the space and Turrell's intervention in this way...

For the centerpiece, Frank Lloyd Wright’s great rotunda has been fitted with six evenly spaced, concentric ovoid rings, smoothly clad in white plastic. They increase in size from the top, where a translucent membrane of the plastic admits light from the skylight, to the bottom, where the last ring fills the space, about ten feet above the floor. An orchestration of slowly shifting colored light, from unseen L.E.D. fixtures between the rings, suffuses the atmosphere with one ravishing payoff after another: breathable beauty. The range of colors, from white to charcoal and from peach to plum, feels limitless: every tone, hue, and saturation that you know and some that seem minted for the occasion. Their sequence, while silent, feels musical, in the way that it flavors time, and hallucinogenic, in the way that it plays hob with spatial perception.

- "Seeing and Disbelieving", July 1st New Yorker

Click the link above for Schjeldahl's full piece and click here to visit the Guggenheim website.