A Dozen Whitney Works to Be Displayed in Lights on the Empire State Building

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“King Kong” was so 20th century. All that climbing and heavy breathing — so low-tech. This is the 21st century. Marc Brickman can have his way with the Empire State Building from wherever he happens to be, which, on Friday, will probably be his usual hangout, somewhere in a hotel with an unobstructed view.

Mr. Brickman, a lighting designer, has worked with Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen and the Blue Man Group, and has created light shows for the Summer Olympics in 1992 and the Winter Olympics in 1998. On Friday, to take note of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s move downtown, he will conjure representations of a dozen works of art onto the sides of the Empire State Building.

More about the idea behind those representations later.

The paintings are not Mr. Brickman’s, although he does paint as a hobby, he said. The paintings are from the Whitney collection. “We’re dealing with Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Murray and Rothko,” he said. “Giants.”

Of course, the Empire State Building is a giant in its own right, and Mr. Brickman’s representations will be displayed with its almost infinitely morphable light system, on the giant space starting at the 72nd floor and climbing 31 stories, as well as 200-plus feet on the antenna structure that gives the building its full 1,454-foot height. “It’s like the biggest gallery in the world,” said Donna De Salvo, the chief curator and deputy director for programs at the Whitney Museum.

For the record, the paintings in question are measured in mere inches. Warhol’s “Flowers” is 36 inches by 36 inches, to name one that Mr. Brickman considers a personal favorite. Murray’s “Children Meeting” is larger, at 101 3/16 inches by 127 inches. Mark Rothko’s “Untitled (Blue, Yellow, Green on Red)” is in-between, at 77 3/4 inches by 65 1/2 inches.Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags” is 30 5/8 inches by 45 1/2 inches, and 4 5/8 inches deep.

Translating — or transforming — paintings like this is a first for the Empire State Building. It lights up in color nearly every night, recognizing everything from sports teams to charities to college commencements. Ms. De Salvo said the light show for the Whitney’s move “could have been the simplest of the red, white and blue.” That would have recognized the “American” in the Whitney’s full name, she said, stretching out the word “American” for emphasis.

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But the planners at the Empire State Building “really got into it,” Ms. De Salvo said. “They started to think about works in our collection.”

They could consider such possibilities because in 2012 the Empire State Building installed an LED lighting system that could generate 16 million colors. It was a far cry from the outdoor lights — four beacons — that were installed by 1956, 25 years after the building opened. They were replaced by more powerful floodlights in 1964, just in time for the World’s Fair, and by colored lights in 1976, just in time for the nation’s bicentennial. For years, the colors were changed by maintenance workers who put colored plastic lenses on more than 200 bulbs.

The new system can be programmed to change colors by itself, no plastic lenses necessary. But conveying paintings on that scale? A painting is paint on canvas. This is light on limestone.

“This is not meant to be a reproduction; it’s meant to be representational,” said Anthony E. Malkin, the chairman and chief executive of Empire State Realty Trust, which owns and operates the building. “This is performance art.”

“It’s using the color palette” of the paintings, Mr. Malkin said. “It’s trying to convey the sense of what the artists presented.”

“Personally, I collect Wyeths,” he said, “but I know a Rothko from a mile away. You know a Jasper Johns. We’re not trying to go with subtlety here. We’re trying to go with visually recognizable themes of major works. I’ve heard Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 a million times, and if you were a real aficionado and you owned a lot of recordings, you would have heard it dozens and dozens of times and you would recognize the subtleties of each performance. If you’re that guy, you’ll connect to this in a different way than someone who clicks on Google for Jasper Johns. Somebody who’s a collector is going to appreciate it differently from someone who is not, but we’re making it possible for somebody who’s not to appreciate it as well.”

The Whitney sent Mr. Brickman high-resolution images of some of the paintings, and there was a test of what he had in mind. A “virtual representation,” Ms. De Salvo called it — images on a computer screen, not on the building itself. “It didn’t happen in the middle of the night and you missed it,” she said.

But there was a run-through in the middle of the night last Friday. Photographers who documented it captured an extravaganza that was more of a light show than a gallery show.

“It was taking what I do and putting it in the context of the art world rather than doing a Pink Floyd show or the Olympics or just another lighting of the Empire State Building,” Mr. Brickman said. “I thought this was an opportunity to take the greatest artists in the world and use that as inspiration, their color palettes and the way they painted — for instance, Rothko and how he used color — and really try to emulate that on the building.”

And as for whether everything will happen on cue this Friday, he said there were backup systems and “redundancy everywhere.” He mentioned the night Hurricane Sandy roared through in 2012: “The lights stayed on while a good portion of New York went black that night. The redundancy was so good, the lights stayed on like a beacon.”

The light show will coincide with the Empire State Building’s 84th anniversary, and there is more of a Whitney tie-in than just this event with the lights. The Whitney’s collection includes a Lewis Hine photograph of one of the ironworkers who pushed the building’s steel frame into the clouds. “Sky boys,” Hine called them.

On Friday, Mr. Brickman’s plan is to walk out of the control room inside the Empire State Building before the lights go on. He will head for his hotel, leaving Dietrich Juengling, a special effects artist, to run the computers that control the light show.

Mr. Brickman will be in touch by cellphone, which, for all the technology involved, will echo the building’s very first day, in 1931. President Herbert Hoover turned on the lights inside — but he was not on the premises, either. He, too, did the honors by remote control, from Washington.