As Seen Below by James Turrell opens as monumental Skyspace in Denmark
James Turrell’s As Seen Below has opened at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, as the artist’s largest Skyspace installed within a museum context. The permanent installation opens ahead of the summer solstice and marks Turrell’s 100th Skyspace, adding a monumental new work to ARoS and completing a major expansion of the museum.
Measuring 16 metres in height and 40 metres in diameter, As Seen Below is entered through an underground corridor before visitors arrive inside a vast domed chamber. At the centre of the ceiling, a circular aperture frames the sky, allowing changing daylight, weather and seasonal conditions to become part of the work. The scale has been compared by the museum to the Pantheon in Rome, but Turrell’s project is not built around historical reference. It uses architecture to alter perception, making light, colour and the open sky the main materials.
The installation continues Turrell’s more than five-decade investigation into the physical and psychological experience of light. His Skyspaces are carefully calibrated environments in which a ceiling opening isolates the sky from its surroundings, changing the way viewers read colour, distance and depth. In Aarhus, this approach is expanded to a collective scale. Visitors sit inside the dome while artificial light washes the chamber and the sky above appears to shift in intensity, tone and surface.
ARoS presents the work in three modes. In Open Sky, the aperture remains open, turning the sky into a changing field of colour during museum opening hours. In Colour Shift, the opening is closed and the interior becomes the focus, with light moving across the walls until the architecture seems to dissolve. At sunrise and sunset, special Twilight sessions combine the open sky with changing coloured light inside the dome, producing the perceptual effect for which Turrell is best known: the sense that the colour of the sky itself is being altered.
The project forms part of a wider expansion developed with Schmidt Hammer Lassen and Aarhus Municipality. Alongside Turrell’s Skyspace, the programme includes The Salling Gallery, a subterranean exhibition space for annual contemporary art commissions opened in June 2025, and the ARoS Art Square, a permanent outdoor area for art presentations. The expansion strengthens ARoS’s focus on large-scale installation, joining works such as Olafur Eliasson’s Your rainbow panorama and Ron Mueck’s Boy within the museum’s collection.
The realisation of As Seen Below was supported by the Salling Foundations, the New Carlsberg Foundation, Aarhus Municipality, ARoS and a private anonymous donation. For Aarhus, the work also functions as a new cultural destination, bringing together art, architecture and public experience within one permanent commission. Rather than presenting light as an image, Turrell turns it into an event that changes with every hour, every visitor and every shift in the sky above Denmark.
All images courtesy of ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, shared with permission
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