Naked art lovers have wandered the corridors of the National Gallery of Australia as part of a cheeky viewing of the gallery's current James Turrell exhibition.

The adult-only tour led by Melbourne-based contemporary artist Stuart Ringholt was open to naked guests only.

The first tour took place after regular gallery hours on Wednesday night.

It was hoped the unique approach to the gallery's summer exhibition would remove the material barrier between artist and audience.

Those who took the tour this morning all agreed that after some initial awkwardness, walking around the gallery naked did not feel as strange as expected.

"Everyone's all in it together, so it's not weird or anything," one man said.

Another art lover said for him, the naked viewing had changed his perspective on art entirely.

"Once you're there... you go, 'Oh I could look at all art like this, for the rest of my life'. I'll probably get arrested in future," he said.

Several of the morning's gallery-goers commented that viewing the Turrell exhibition naked helped them experience the art more completely, by removing peripheral distractions.

"You don't have the clothing distracting you. And because of the light installations, everyone very neutral," one woman said.

"It just gives it a very different perspective."

'Everyone becomes very equal'

In Turrell's last visit to the capital he suggested the gallery allow audiences to experience his work naked, as had previously been done during one of his exhibitions in Japan.

After leading this morning's tour, Ringholt told the ABC being nude "liberates the spirit".

"I believe we're less sexualised with our clothes off and we're more sexualised with them on. So by doing the nude tour we get to know a lot about ourselves," he said.

Ringholt said participants also learned a lot about fear, shame and embarrassment through the viewing.

"But what's more with James Turrell's show is, he focuses on light," he said.

"I believe that many of his works are best suited to the nude viewer, because your whole body can partake in a colour experience."

Ringholt has conducted nude tours in other galleries, viewing the works of different artists.

But the artist said conducting the nude tours of Turrell's work was a real experiment.

"He has a room which is called the Gansfield room. It's coloured light and it was really quite beautiful to see people exit," he said.

"In a space of just a second people moved through four different skin colour hues. Their bodies changed radically. It was almost like they were a changeling from a science fiction film or something.

"The nude body works really well with Turrell."

Ringholt said a lot of people were quite awkward with the clothes on.

"But once they're off, you can't tell who has the most money. There aren't all those cultural signifiers that clothes carry. So everyone becomes very equal... everyone looks pretty much the same," he said.

But for one young woman who took the tour, it really was all about the nakedness.

"We loved it... we did a naked cartwheel together, in the National Gallery of Australia," she said.

The final tour will take place tonight at 7pm.