James Turrell’s Epic “As Seen Below” Opens in Denmark

James Turrell Just Completed His 100th Skyspace. It’s the Biggest One Yet.

James Turrell has spent decades teaching people to look at light, not through it or past it, but directly at it as a thing worth your full attention.

His newest work, As Seen Below, is his 100th Skyspace and the largest he’s ever built inside a museum.

At ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, the piece draws visitors through a darkened corridor before releasing them into a domed chamber 130 feet wide and 52 feet tall, with a single 20-foot oculus cut into the apex.

The installation runs in three distinct modes depending on when you visit. During regular hours, the aperture sits open to bare sky.

Every half hour it seals, and the chamber cycles through a programmed sequence of color Turrell calls Colour Shift.

Then there’s Twilight, a separately bookable session timed to sunrise or sunset, where the dome’s interior hues track the changing light outside in real time. In Aarhus in summer, the sun doesn’t set until past 10:30 p.m., and that’s not a footnote so much as the whole premise.

The dome took nearly a decade to complete, slowed by inflation, pandemic delays, and a contractor bankruptcy before finally opening this month, timed quietly and deliberately to the summer solstice.

Turrell’s influence extends well past museum walls. Drake built the entire visual language of “Hotline Bling” around his Breathing Light installation at LACMA, and when asked about it, Turrell said he was flattered, though he’d had nothing to do with the video.

As Seen Below is on view at ARoS Aarhus from $16.