The ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum is an art museum in Aarhus. ARoS is one of the largest art museums in northern Europe, 10 storeys tall with a total floor area of 17,000 m². The museum opened on 8 April 2004 after a construction process that started with Danish architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen winning the design competition in 1997.ARoS has a large art collection with works from the Golden Age until today. Works from the collection exhibited in changing exhibitions. Alongside the museum features special exhibition of Danish and international artists such as Ólafur Elíasson, Bjørn Nørgaard, Ingvar Cronhammar, architect Frank Gehry, Paul McCarthy, Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Kvium, H.C. Andersen, Bill Viola and Wim Wenders. The first of these exhibitions presented a series of main works by pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. As many other modern art galleries and museums ARoS also plays great tribute to architects and their works having hosted several architecture themed exhibitions.Located in the basement is The 9 Spaces, a gallery with installation art from artist like James Turrell, Shirin Neshat and Olafur Eliasson. The number 9 refers to Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy and the 9 circles of hell. The rooms are painted black to contrast with the bright white exterior. The roof terrace substitutes for the divine light your enter from hell. This way the whole museum is part of the travel from hell to heaven. This movement emphasised by the grand spiral staircase in the main 'museum streetscape'. The roof of the museum is dominated by the installation Your rainbow panorama by Ólafur Elíasson. This circular skywalk has windows in the colors of the rainbow thereby showing the panorama of Aarhus in different colors depending on location of the viewer. The installation cost 60m kroner ($10.7m) to construct and was sponsored by the Realdania foundation.It was inaugurated on May 28, 2011. A second section, a glass lounge that guides visitors from the main museum building to Your rainbow panorama and houses another site-specific work opened in 2013.
The name ARoS refers to the Old Danish name of the city Aarhus, Áros, while the capitalized letters of the name hint at the Latin word for art, namely ars.