James Turrell’s largest Skyspace built within a museum has opened at ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark, timed to this past weekend’s summer solstice. Titled As Seen Below – The Dome, it is a grass-covered dome 40 metres across and 16 high, reached through a long underground corridor that delivers visitors into a Pantheon-scale chamber where a six-metre oculus frames the open sky above. It is Turrell’s 100th Skyspace, and the artist himself has called it his most ambitious to date.
“In As Seen Below, I’m shaping the experience of seeing rather than delivering an image,” Turrell has said of the work. “The architecture holds the sky close, so you recognize that the act of looking is the work itself.” That distinction between an image and an experience runs through everything the space does: rather than a single fixed effect, the dome operates in three registers, an open-sky mode where the oculus frames the sky directly, an hourly colour shift where the aperture closes and the chamber is washed instead in shifting interior light, and a twilight mode timed to sunrise and sunset, when the colour inside the dome and the sky outside seem to change together.
The work completes The Next Level, the museum’s roughly 4,000-square-metre underground expansion designed by the Danish studio Schmidt Hammer Lassen, of which Turrell’s dome is the centrepiece. Above ground, the structure emerges from the museum’s park as a grass-covered mound topped with an operable lid that can seal the oculus and double as a lighting system; below, an illuminated concrete corridor carries visitors from the museum’s original building into the chamber, a deliberate passage from light into darkness designed to build anticipation before the encounter with the sky. According to Jette Birkeskov Mogensen, a director at Schmidt Hammer Lassen, fitting a structure of this scale into a public park without overwhelming it was among the project’s hardest problems, one that ultimately required redesigning the park itself around the dome.
The project has been a decade in development, carried across the tenures of three ARoS directors, and sits below ground near Olafur Eliasson’s rooftop ring, Your Rainbow Panorama, so that one work colours the city from above while the other pulls the eye upward from below. Turrell, now 82 and still at work on his decades-long Roden Crater project in the Arizona desert, trained as a pilot as a young man, and has spoken of the hours he spent in the air, watching the sky’s shifting atmosphere and colour, as formative to the work he has made ever since.
It’s open now, with Open Sky viewing free during museum hours, Colour Shift sessions running roughly hourly through the day, and the most rewarding sessions reserved in advance for Twilight, when the dome’s light tracks the changing sky at dawn and dusk. Details, including the timed-entry booking system, are at aros.dk. Aarhus is Denmark’s second city, a short hop or a few hours by train from Copenhagen. Visit ARoS Aarhus Art Museum here.
