James Turrell Reveals the Creative Process Behind His 100th Skyspace
The artist takes Galerie behind the scenes of his most recent installation in Denmark
Last week at Art Basel, I was talking to a collector, explaining that I was on my way to Aarhus in Denmark to see James Turrell’s latest Skyspace. “Oh yes,” she said approvingly. “My friend has one of those.”
Plenty indeed do. There are now, including Aarhus, 100 Skyspaces—where an oculus cut into a roof frames the ever-changing sky—and many are in private collections. “The very first was in Santa Monica,” James Turrell tells Galerie, referring to the one built in the roof of his studio in the Mendota Hotel. “Then Count Panza saw it in 1972 and purchased his own to be built in Italy, in Varese.” Since then, they have been acquired by art institutions, foundations, and private individuals all over the world. The one in the Chichu Museum on the island of Naoshima in Japan is among the best known and loved, inserted as it is into the sublime architecture of Tadao Ando. It is called Open Sky. The one at Aarhus is As Seen Below.
Skyspace aficionados will probably think of a square chamber or a cylindrical space with little decoration where visitors sit around the perimeter and gaze upward, bathing in its nuance of changing colors and passing clouds. In Aarhus, things are rather different. A subterranean 4,300-square-foot extension has been added to the ARoS museum by architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen to accommodate this Skyspace—an enormous circular chamber 430 square feet across and 172 square feet high. It is topped by a spectacular domed roof, complete with an oculus that occasionally frames silhouettes of birds in flight. With its radial paved floor of pale gray elongated cast-concrete bricks and its mirror-polished concrete center, it is more like entering a Renaissance Italian piazza. Stand in the right place, and your voice will reverberate around, just like in the Pantheon in Rome, or St. Paul’s Whispering Gallery in London. This is a work that acknowledges the history of architecture as well as the history of Turrell’s own five-decade oeuvre.
Turrell was raised as a Quaker, and there has always been a humanistic and contemplative quality to his work. “It is about light, time, patience, perception,” said Rebecca Matthews on the opening night, when the Danish king and queen had arrived and taken their seats. “Over 60 years, James Turrell has returned to one question, ‘What does it mean to see?’” The work, reached along a winding tunnel, is, according to Turrell, like “entering Earth and arriving in Heaven.”
Aarhus (pronounced Oorhus) is Denmark’s second city, with a population of around 300,000. But the ARoS Museum’s visitor numbers double that figure. It features an open, inviting architecture of concentric rings (like a deconstructed Guggenheim) and a path passing through from one side of the surrounding park to the other. Visitors aren’t even obliged to look at the art, though it boasts a collection of nearly 8,500 works. On its top is a circular glass storey—an installation by Olafur Eliasson—that allows visitors to walk through the colors of the rainbow. Built in 2011, it now has a strong second life as Instagram catnip.
As Seen Below is open to the public all day, with nighttime bookings available. These are already sought after: in this northern part of the world, twilight is a long and special time. “It’s the added twilight that will make it remarkable,” says Turrell. “That, along with the fuller atmospheric expression of the clouds, makes it unique.” He has long admired the quality of northern light in paintings by Casper David Friedrich and Lars Hertevig. “The most influential is the Danish-born American light artist Thomas Wilfred,” he adds. Now he has created his own version.
The project goes back more than ten years, when then-director Erlend G. Høyersten staged a Turrell show and acquired a work. “They really got to know each other and started to make a plan,” says Jette Birkeskov, the architect who has been project director since 2018. “We visited Turrell in Flagstaff in 2019,” she continues, “and went to Roden Crater [the extinct volcano that Turrell has developed in a work of land art]. It’s one of the highlights of my life, standing on its top looking out over the desert.” Rebecca Matthews inherited the project when she became director of the museum in 2022. “I was stepping into something really special,” she says, and went on to raise the funds.
Turrell originally wanted a fully submerged sphere, but even this version, semi-submerged with its dome emerging into the park above, cost approximately $45.7 million. (The sum accounts for the entire extension, which includes a new underground gallery.) “Our concern was about people climbing on top of it and getting hurt, or falling through the hole,” says Birkeskov. “So we had to create a lid that can close immediately when sensors detect a person getting too close.” The lid, made in Cor-Ten steel, has become a significant part of the artwork: this is the first Skyspace that has one.
On opening night, music by Caterina Berardi and work by Philip Glass played. The king fidgeted as a light show turned the smooth white ceiling of the dome from orange to green to ochre. The sky seen through the oculus turned white or magenta or blue, tricked into this transformation by the human eye. Finally, an ink-black hole appeared in the white sphere. The mood in the room was one of deep calm and communal contentment. “In an age of acceleration, this asks us to stop and think,” said Matthews. “That’s the most radical thing you can do.”