“It’s big.” That was the first thing James Turrell said to Rebecca Matthews, director of ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (ARoS), when he stepped inside the dome of his newest Skyspace, As Seen Below (2026).
By any measure, As Seen Below is big: the largest Skyspace ever made for a museum, a dome more than 130 feet in diameter and 52 feet high, with a nearly 20-foot oculus opening to the sky. It is also Turrell’s 100th Skyspace—his signature genre of installation involving an enclosed room with a crisp ceiling cutout that frames the sky—and a marvel of architecture and engineering.
The work, which just opened at ARoS in time with the summer solstice, is a major milestone for the influential Light and Space artist, now 83. And it’s poised to position Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, as one of Europe’s must-visit art destinations. But to talk about the monumentality of the work is only to scratch the surface.
What happens inside Turrell’s As Seen Below
At the Skyspace’s inauguration on June 19th, Matthews described the work as “the sky itself, precisely held by the architecture, so that light becomes the material and time feels suspended.”
To reach As Seen Below, visitors descend into a dim underground passage, guided by tracks of light. After a short, curving walk downwards, an entryway appears and opens into the vast domed chamber, where a perfect circle of sky is cut from the center. “I always wanted to enter earth and emerge in the heavens,” Turrell told Artsy.
Inside, more than 1,100 light sources can illuminate the curved walls with a succession of glowing hues. Visitors may sit on cushions along a double-decker ring of cast concrete benches, walk around, or lie on the cool polished granite at the center of the floor and look straight up. Sitting still or lying down makes it more likely that a Ganzfeld-like effect will take over—in which the visual experience intensifies and one’s grasp of depth and scale begins to slip away. Yet Turrell is never prescriptive about how to experience a Skyspace. “Each visitor looks at it in their own way,” he told Artsy. “I do hope they give it attention, but the Skyspace asks nothing.”
During the daytime, a color sequence occurs periodically as a retractable lid slowly closes over the aperture in a motion that recalls an eclipse. The circle of sky is covered, replaced by what looks like a glowing orb: At times, it resembles a pearly white moon, at others, a radiant sphere that seems to float.
New colors arrive quickly, yet almost imperceptibly. Look down for a few seconds and the room has changed; look closely and the shift is so smooth the new color seems to have appeared without notice. Lavender turns pink, then fuchsia; steely blue gives way to purple, cyan, emerald, chartreuse. Turrell’s palette makes you hyperaware of color’s precision: Blue is not simply blue, but maybe cerulean, cobalt, or ultramarine.
Though there is stillness, the dome is not silent. The sound of a shuffled shoe or a sneeze ricochets through the space; a plane flying overhead is booming and immense. The sounds only add to the shared experience.
How to visit As Seen Below at ARoS
As Seen Below can be experienced in three main ways: during ARoS’s regular museum hours, at sunrise, or at sunset. During regular hours, the Skyspace is open to the elements, with the oculus framing the changing light and weather above the city; the color sequence runs every hour on the half-hour.
The most dramatic encounters take place at the separate sunrise and sunset sessions, bookable in advance. For these experiences, the aperture remains open, and Turrell’s light program is timed precisely to the changing atmosphere outside.
In Aarhus, where Nordic light drastically alters the length of the day, sunset can come as late as 10:30 p.m. in high summer, and sunrise as early as 4:30 a.m. During this time, the precisely timed experiences can last an hour; morning sessions are set to end at sunrise, and evening sessions begin as sunset commences. In winter, when daylight is scarce, the experience is shorter, and one need not arrive for a sunrise session quite so early. (This writer joined a sunrise session that began at 3:17 a.m.) There is also a café on site where visitors can purchase a beverage—be that coffee, tea, or a beer—to bring inside.
The museum is also preparing programming to take place within the dome, including concerts, yoga, meditation sessions, and activities for children.
Why As Seen Below was destined for ARoS
The work’s creation, led by architecture firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen, was as exacting as its effect. The dome’s interior was formed from large fiberglass shells, then covered with concrete, earth, and grass. To achieve the smooth consistency within the dome, a single craftsman painted and sanded the nearly 13,000 square feet of interior surface. As the project director Jette Birkeskov Mogensen put it: “We want to show the magic, but we don’t want to reveal the technique.”
For Turrell, each Skyspace is shaped by its context. “Each location and its latitude, the moisture content in the air, and city lights are unique and will yield a different program of our light inside in relation to the light in the atmosphere,” he told Artsy.
As Seen Below also resonates with the museum itself. “It’s absolutely been in our DNA as a museum to work on large-scale, deeply sensory, immersive environments that often have some kind of duration to them,” Matthews told Artsy. “With this work, we wanted to continue that trajectory, but also to offer something very site-specific, and something that offered our audiences a communal experience.”
The work also completes a larger story. The ARoS building was conceived around the concept of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with visitors moving through nine levels of art with the symbolic “heaven” of the roof: Olafur Eliasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama (2011), a circular colored glass walkway offering 360-degree views of Aarhus. Turrell’s Skyspace creates a counterpoint: inward, underground, and pulling us to stay still and look, not at the city, but up, into the heavens.
In remarks from Turrell, read on his behalf at As Seen Below’s inauguration, he noted that the work’s development stretched back to early conversations in 2011. Its realization was shaped by COVID, inflation, soaring construction costs, and even a contractor bankruptcy. As the project’s challenges mounted, he said, donors were asked to give more, new supporters were found, and the city and the monarchy were critical in bringing the work to completion.
The awe-inspiring Skyspace is poised to boost museum attendance and international visitors to Aarhus. Matthews’s ambitions, however, are more human in scope. “I hope that people remember sitting beneath this Jutland sky with someone they love,” she said in a speech at As Seen Below’s inauguration. “I hope families return at different moments in their lives, and I hope they find something new each time. And I hope that children growing up in Aarhus today will one day look at this dome and feel that it has simply always been part of their city, part of their lives, part of their memory, not merely a monument but woven into our stories, a shared cultural inheritance.”
“I think we’ve always had the sky,” she offered. “I think James Turrell has taught us how to see it.”
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