A hole in a ceiling to help bring the heavens down to earth: it’s a simple idea that has animated James Turrell’s series of “Skyspace” works dating back to the 1970s, including a new one set to open at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark.
It’s being touted as the largest-ever such work in a museum context (some are freestanding, in buildings of their own), and its opening in June will mark the completion of an expansion for the museum in Denmark’s second-largest city, a harbor town around three hours by train from Copenhagen.
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The work, titled As Seen Below – The Dome, a Skyspace by James Turrell, will be accessible via an underground corridor that leads to a domed space measuring around 50 feet tall and 130 feet in diameter. At the top is an open aperture through which what constitutes “the sky” seems to descend and become discernible at a much closer distance.
“With As Seen Below I’m shaping the experience of seeing rather than delivering an image,” Turrell said in a statement. “The architecture holds the sky close, so you recognize that the act of looking is the work itself. Here light isn’t description; it’s the substance you stand within. In this Skyspace the day has weight, the evening has temperature, and the change belongs to you.”
ARoS director Rebecca Matthews called it “an extraordinary work that invites visitors to slow down, look up, and experience light, time, and space in profoundly moving ways.”
Turrell’s new addition will be a finishing touch on the ARoS museum’s “Next Level” expansion, which also includes an underground exhibition space for commissioned work that opened last summer and an outdoor “Art Square” space opening next year.
As for Turrell, the vaunted Light and Space artist continues to be busy at the age of 82, with work still ongoing on his fabled decades-long project Roden Crater. In an interview this past summer, Turrell told the New York Times, “We have all the plans completed for the Roden Crater, so it can be finished if I’m gone. But I would like to see that myself. Moses didn’t get to go to the Promised Land. I will certainly continue as far as I can. I may have visualized the light at the end of the tunnel, but I haven’t gone through it. So I’m still at it, and will be.”
