Inside James Turrell’s Most Ambitious Skyspace to Date

Over a decade in the making, the American artist’s 100th Skyspace to date blends ideas from Western and Eastern art, philosophy, science and religion

James Turrell’s first experiment with light occurred when he was a young boy growing up in Los Angeles in the 1940s. “Probably as a result of the air attack back in 1942, an edict had been issued for all houses [in Los Angeles] to place blackout shades over the windows at night,” he recalls. “When I was six years old, in order to assert my own presence in the room, I took a pin or needle to these curtains and pierced them to make star patterns and the constellations … They weren’t just holes in the curtains, they were holes in reality.”

Now 83 years old, Turrell is one of the most famous contemporary artists today, lauded for his remarkable installations that play with light, colour and perception. His religious Quaker upbringing, with its austerity and contemplation, and his deep love of aviation, with its unparalleled access to the sky and its changing colours, are central to understanding his artworks – immersive, meditative spaces where the viewer is asked to slow down and surrender themselves to light and landscape. Turrell is trained in art and the psychology of perception, and in the 1960s he became part of the Light and Space movement, where he began experimenting and reshaping the way we see light. The Skyspaces are his most famous works: enclosed chambers with benches along the walls and an aperture in the ceiling that allows the viewer to watch the colour of the sky shift from dawn to dusk, enhanced by a programmed lighting show. Now, Turrell has unveiled his 100th and most ambitious Skyspace yet: As Seen Below at ARoS Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark. 

Turrell’s Quaker upbringing made him “responsive to the straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime, which Asian cultures also seemed to offer,” he once said. After visiting Japan and Korea in the 60s, he studied Buddhism, Eastern philosophy and meditation, which became key to the Skyspaces in their “embrace of the void, the positive emptiness, and the idea of enlightenment.” Quakerism embraces the idea of “greeting the light within” all of us, and the Skyspaces – which blend ideas from Western and Eastern art, philosophy, science, and religion – emphasise this concept of light and vision as something both physical and spiritual. “I am interested in the seeing that occurs within,” said Turrell. “In the lucid dream there is a greater sense of color and lucidity than with the eyes open. I am interested in a place where the imaginative seeing and the seeing of the external world meet.” Kept in private and public venues around the world, Turrell’s Skyspaces are housed everywhere from a Quaker meeting house in Houston to a traditional Japanese farmhouse in Tokamachi. They also feature at the artist’s magnum opus, Roden Crater, a vast ongoing land art piece created within a pit formed by an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert, which is not yet open to the public.  

Over a decade in the making, Turrell’s new Skyspace at ARoS is his largest in a museum space, rising 16 metres high and spanning 40 metres in diameter. Upon entering the dome, which is accessed via an underground passage, the sheer vastness of the space is astounding, although the dome – and the sky itself, viewed through a hole in the ceiling – is rendered flat as if by magic. The Danish architecture firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen, who collaborated with Turrell on this project, are responsible for this mind-bending visual trick; the 13,000 square foot interior of the dome has been sanded and painted by a single craftsman, making it impossible for the human eye to perceive its surface and depth. A retractable lid, which weighs 19 tons, moves soundlessly over the oculus in the ceiling – blocking out the sky – for scheduled light shows, where over 1,100 artificial light sources illuminate the dome in vibrant, shifting colours. 

Stepping into the Skyspace for the first time is a disorientating experience. All the usual rules of logic and perception go out of the window, a fact further enhanced by the strange acoustics of the space, where even the smallest of sounds ricochets around. It’s hard not to draw a comparison to Backrooms, Kane Parsons’s recent A24 horror, which was inspired by an ominous photograph posted on 4chan of a windowless, seemingly infinite maze of yellow rooms. Although less foreboding, Turrell’s installation is another mysterious liminal space, completely divorced from reality. When the light show begins, the experience turns psychedelic; as colours slowly shift from neon orange to hot pink, indigo to mint green, the ceiling’s circular lid morphs into a pulsating egg, impossibly three dimensional and perfectly round. Hindu creation myths, like the Vishnu Purana, describe the cosmic egg of the universe containing a mountain at its center, while, in scholar Adrian Snodgrass’s book The Symbolism of the Stupa, he describes the two complementary poles of the ovoid Cosmic Egg as Heaven and Earth, “by whose ‘interaction’ the phenomenal universe comes into existence.” Given his lifelong interest in religion, the egg symbolism of the Skyspace’s aperture is significant; by cutting a hole in the ceiling, the artist connects Heaven and Earth, offering up an otherworldly meditation on birth, life, death and our place in the universe. 

“This Skyspace is a durational and deeply immersive piece, and you have to give it time,” says ARoS’ director, Rebecca Matthews. “It’s never the same, because the sky is never the same, the season is never the same, and you’re never the same. You bring something new to it each time. It requires engagement physically, emotionally, and spiritually.” The architects from Schmidt Hammer Lassen also stress the fact that, when in a Turrell Skyspace, our skin takes in colour which affects our hormones. “You will feel a red colour or a blue colour – it will either release stress hormones or melatonin,“ say Jette Birkeskov and Morten Schmidt. ”We want to feel what it means to be in this colour.”

Turrell is immensely famous as an artist, adored by musicians like Beyoncé, Drake (whose luminous Hotline Bling music video sets lifted inspiration from his artwork) and Kanye West (who donated $10 million to Roden Crater before shooting his concert film Jesus is King there), who are responsible for making him into a household name. But his popularity often overshadows just how good the work is, as well as flattening the complex philosophical concepts behind it. His installations are undeniably photogenic, drawing influencers in droves – #jamesturrell has been hashtagged 181,000 times on Instagram – yet what his work really asks of us is presence. During one of my evening visits to the Skyspace, as the aperture opens to reveal the sky beyond, birds can be seen diving in and out of the clouds, blissfully unaware of the audience beneath them. Time slows down, birdsong fills the space, and people weep. It’s a moment of quiet, fleeting majesty, masterfully engineered by Turrell. I resist the urge to raise my phone and photograph it. 

As Seen Below – The Dome, a Skyspace by James Turrell is now on show at ARoS Art Museum in Aarhus.