Artist the James Turrell is set to to open the largest-ever version of his Skyspace installation to be hosted at a public institution.
After a decade in development, the work, entitled As Seen Below – The Dome, will launch on 19 June 2026 at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark. Visitors will enter the work through an underground, light-filled corridor before encountering the vast indoor domed space, where they can view the sky through a circular hole in the ceiling.
“Measuring 16 metres in height and 40 metres in diameter, As Seen Below will be the artist’s most ambitious Skyspace to date,” says a museum statement. “Turrell’s distinctive lighting will wash the entire domed space and frame the endless sky, seen through the large central aperture.”
Turrell says in a statement that the piece has been in the making for many years and will open to the public in time for the 2026 summer solstice.
“I look forward to seeing how visitors encounter and interact with this work, my largest and most ambitious Skyspace in a public museum,” the artist says. “With As Seen Below I’m shaping the experience of seeing rather than delivering an image.”
Other Skyspaces are housed at MoMA PS1 in New York (Meeting, 1980-86/2016)—the first such work Turrell made in the US—and at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK (Deer Shelter Skyspace, 2006).
The artist continues to work on an ambitious land art project, Roden Crater, which he began in 1979, which will transform the inside of an extinct volcanic crater in northern Arizona into a viewing observatory.
His installation at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum forms part of a major expansion project for the museum, called The Next Level.
