For James Turrell, the sky has never been empty. It is material, architecture, colour, illusion, and a kind of vast perceptual screen that changes every time you think you have understood it.
This summer, that lifelong obsession arrives in Denmark on a monumental scale. On June 19, 2026, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum opens As Seen Below – The Dome, a Skyspace by James Turrell, the artist’s largest Skyspace ever created in a museum context. The work completes ARoS’s long-running expansion project, The Next Level, and places one of Turrell’s most ambitious light environments beneath the Danish sky.
Turrell’s Skyspaces are deceptively simple: rooms with carefully cut openings that frame the sky. But their power lies in what happens to perception once you are inside. The sky stops feeling distant. Colour becomes unstable. Light begins to behave almost physically. What looked like atmosphere becomes presence. What looked like emptiness starts to feel designed.
At ARoS, the experience is built on a dramatic scale. Visitors enter through an underground, light-filled corridor before arriving in a vast domed chamber, where the sky is seen through a circular aperture overhead. The work measures around 16 metres in height and 40 metres in diameter, making it Turrell’s most ambitious Skyspace to date.
That ambition feels right for ARoS, a museum already known for turning architecture into sensory encounter through Olafur Eliasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama. With Turrell, the museum extends that relationship between body, building, and atmosphere, but in a quieter, more meditative register. Instead of walking through colour above the city, visitors enter a space where the sky itself becomes the event.
There is something almost spiritual in the way Turrell works with light. His art does not ask you to decode an image. It asks you to slow down enough to notice how seeing happens. The American artist, born in 1943, has spent decades treating light not as something that reveals the world, but as a medium in its own right. His rooms are less about spectacle than surrender: you enter, sit, wait, and gradually realise that perception is not fixed at all.
In Aarhus, that idea becomes civic as well as intimate. The opening will be marked by a public celebration in Musikhusparken, with Denmark’s Royal Couple attending, underlining the scale of the moment for both ARoS and the city.