Modern art fans listen up – something big is coming to the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum next year. Like, as-wide-as-Rome’s-Pantheon big. A huge ‘Skyspace’ designed by James Turrell will open up next June, and it will be the biggest installation of its kind to date.
What exactly is a Skyspace? Great question. The term was coined by Turrell back in the ’70s to name his creations, which ARoS describes as ‘monumental works of art and architecture, each featuring a large aperture in the ceiling that frames the open sky’. In other words, they’re big rooms with huge windows in the ceiling.
That might sound simple enough, but when Turrell works his magic he turns these spaces into sensory experiences, manipulating light and darkness to create immersive artworks which ‘invite viewers to experience the shifting colours and qualities of natural light’. In his own words: ‘I’m shaping the experience of seeing rather than delivering an image’.
This work, called ‘As Seen Below – The Dome’, will featuee an underground tunnel leading into a huge dome-topped room, which looks a bit like the interior of a futuristic space-station, or a strange liminal space from a dream. At 16m tall and 40m wide (the same diameter as the Pantheon’s dome), this is a vast empty space, the perfect setting to consider big ideas like ‘our relationship to nature, the sky, and our shared planet’.
The Skyspace will open on June 19, 2026, and will be a permanent addition to the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. This comes alongside a broader improvement scheme at the museum, which includes a new underground gallery and the Art Square, ‘a new permanent outdoor space for art exhibitions’.
A spokesperson for the museum said that it was ‘delighted’ to become home to Turrell’s biggest Skyspace, noting ‘this is not only a remarkable artwork for ARoS, but also a new cultural landmark for Aarhus’.
Talking about it is all well and good, but Turrell’s work is the sort of thing that has to be seen to be believed. Here’s a sneak peak of what the new Skyspace in Aarhus will look like when it’s complete.
Pretty spectacular, right? The new Skyspace opens in Aarhus on June 19, 2026.
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