- James Turrell’s largest to date opens at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark in June 2026.
- The dome-shaped frames the sky underground, inviting reflection on light, vision, and perception itself.
- Delayed by financial setbacks, the massive installation anchors ARoS’s new subterranean art expansion, The Next Level.
The largest installation ever built by the artist James Turrell for a public institution will open at Denmark’s ARoS Aarhus Art Museum on June 19, 2026—just in time for the summer solstice.
The work, called – , takes the form of a vast underground room with a view of the sky, housed within a grassy mound. Just how big is the piece? At more than 50 feet high and 130 feet in diameter, it is roughly the same size as the Pantheon’s fabled dome in Rome. “With , I’m shaping the experience of seeing rather than delivering an image,” Turrell said in a statement. “The architecture holds the sky close, so you recognize that the act of looking is the work itself. Here, light isn’t description, it’s the substance you stand within.”
James Turrell, (2025). Photo: Mads Smidstrup © ARoS, 2025. From James Turrell’s visit in As Seen Below, June 2025.
To reach the —a term Turrell coined in the 1970s to describe his chambers fitted with apertures that frame the sky— visitors will pass through a light-filled tunnel that connects the main museum to a partially subterranean expansion called The Next Level. This includes an underground exhibition space called the Salling Gallery, which opened earlier this year, and a new permanent outdoor exhibition space, which also opens in 2026.
“The artist’s most significant to date is an extraordinary work that invites visitors to slow down, look up, and experience light, time, and space in profoundly moving ways,” Rebecca Matthews, the director of ARoS, said in a statement. “This is not only a monumental addition to ARoS but also a gift to the public.”
Turrell’s dome was first announced in 2015 as part of a collaboration with the expansion’s architects, Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, but there have been some bumps along the road. The project was originally due to open in 2023, but has faced financial and technical setbacks, including when the supplier of the lid for the large dome went bankrupt earlier this year. Back in 2016, the expansion was estimated to cost €40 million (then around $47 million), but more recent reports in Danish media noted that an additional 6.7 million kroner ($670,000) in funding had to be found this year.
An artist’s impression of the James Turrell dome at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. Photo: courtesy Schmidt Hammer Lassen.
Inspired by his Quaker upbringing and experiencing the vast canvas of the sky as a pilot, Turrell installed his first at the Panza Collection in Varese, Italy, in 1974. Over the past half century, the series has grown to include around 90 unique installations across the globe. Most recently, Turrell has installed in a Coloradan mountainside, within a park in Monterrey, Mexico, and at a Quaker school in Manhattan.
Turrell continues to work on his magnum opus at Roden Crater in Arizona, where the artist is transforming a volcanic cone into a space for people to observe light. The project has been in development since 1977 and remains without a scheduled opening date.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
