Photos reveal James Turrell's "largest and most ambitious Skyspace" ahead of opening

Images have been released of James Turrell's soon-to-be-completed Skyspace at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, which will be the American artist's largest yet.

Set to open to the public on 19 June 2026, the As Seen Below installation is housed in a 40-metre-wide domed extension beside the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.

It completes a major expansion of the museum led by Danish studio Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects that has also seen a subterranean gallery and outdoor exhibition space added to the venue.

Visitors will enter the installation through a "light-filled" underground corridor that links to the new subterranean Salling Gallery before reaching the museum's basement levels.

Inside, a large central aperture frames views of the sky from within the 16-metre-tall dome, which is washed in monochromatic colours through a lighting system designed by Turrell.

"I look forward to seeing how visitors encounter and interact with this work – my largest and most ambitious Skyspace in a public museum," Turrell said.

"With As Seen Below I'm shaping the experience of seeing rather than delivering an image," he continued.

"The architecture holds the sky close, so you recognise that the act of looking is the work itself."

Other details within the minimalist enclosure include stepped seating that wraps around the space and concentric brick paving that radiates outwards from a central pit.

Meanwhile, renders of the Skyspace's domed exterior, which is yet to be completed, depict a grass-covered volume situated within the museum's garden and crowned with the central oculus.

A built-in seating area is set to wind around its base, where the installation's entrance will punctuate the structure.

Elsewhere, the artist has designed a "monumental sequence of chambers" for an installation in Saudi Arabia's AlUla desert and a "transcendent" Skyspace installation inside a stone-clad structure on a forested slope in Colorado.

Other museums recently featured on Dezeen include a "transformative yet discreet" overhaul of the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester and the Taichung Green Museumbrary in Taiwan organised across eight interconnected blocks.

The photography is by Mads Smidstrup courtesy of ARoS.

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