To mark the opening of James Turrell’s major Skyspace in Denmark and ahead of his forthcoming solo exhibition at Almine Rech New York in November 2026, the gallery has brought together a selection of the artist’s key exhibitions, tracing more than three decades of sustained engagement with light, space and perception.

As Seen Below – The Dome, a permanent installation at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark takes centrestage as it opens to the public. Conceived as a Skyspace and part of the museum’s collection, the work is described by James Turrell as his most ambitious iteration of the format to date. Within its architectural chamber, the sky is framed as both subject and material, its chromatic and atmospheric shifts calibrated against an environment engineered to heighten sensory awareness.

Turrell’s practice has long resisted the language of representation in favour of direct perceptual encounter. “With As Seen Below, I am shaping the very experience of seeing rather than simply delivering an image,” the artist has said. “The architecture brings the sky close, so you recognise that the act of looking is the work itself.” Perception is not passive reception but an active condition produced through the convergence of light and architecture.

The Aarhus Skyspace extends a body of work that has, since the late 1960s, treated light as both medium and subject. A trained pilot with more than 12,000 hours in the air, Turrell has frequently described the sky as his primary studio, an ever-changing field in which depth, colour and horizon are unstable constructs rather than fixed realities.

Inside, visitors sit beneath a 16-metre-high dome as calibrated light sequences alter the perception of both the interior space and the sky above. At sunrise and sunset, the experience becomes especially immersive, as shifting hues dissolve the boundaries between natural and artificial light, turning observation into a slow, contemplative act.

This magnum opus follows a sequence of exhibitions that chart the artist’s work across Europe and Asia with Almine Rech. In Paris, Path Taken (2024) at Almine Rech, Matignon further developed Turrell’s interest in perceptual thresholds through immersive environments that dissolve spatial certainty. Earlier presentations, including City of Light in Shanghai (2019), exhibitions in Brussels (2010), and a series of Paris shows, Tall Glasses (2005), Milk Run III (2002), and Hi Test (1999–2000), demonstrate an increasingly precise calibration of light, enclosure and duration.

A longer historical arc is traced back to 1989–90, when Turrell’s presentation at the gallery’s first Paris space included early Space Division works, establishing a dialogue that has continued across successive exhibitions and formats. That inaugural moment set the terms for a relationship defined less by periodic retrospectives than by an ongoing testing of perception as material.