ARoS Aarhus Art Museum
Ten-storey brick cube in central Aarhus, crowned by Olafur Eliasson's circular rainbow walkway.
ARoS traces its origins to Aarhus Kunstmuseum, founded in 1859, which makes it one of the oldest public art collections in Denmark. The present building, designed by the Aarhus practice Schmidt Hammer Lassen, opened in April 2004 next to the Musikhuset concert hall. It takes the form of a ten-storey brick cube of roughly 20,700 square metres, sliced through by a curving internal street. Dante's Divine Comedy shaped the layout, with dark lower galleries beneath and progressively lighter spaces above.
The collection covers Danish Golden Age painting, modernism and international contemporary art, and includes Ron Mueck's outsized sculpture Boy. Since 2011 the roof has carried Olafur Eliasson's Your Rainbow Panorama, a glazed circular walkway some 150 metres long whose panes run through the full colour spectrum. In June 2026 the museum completed a large expansion by the same architects, adding an underground Sailing Gallery, an outdoor Art Square and a grass-covered dome housing James Turrell's Skyspace As Seen Below.
Highlights
- Your Rainbow Panorama, a 150-metre circular rooftop walkway in every colour
- As Seen Below, James Turrell's Skyspace inside a grass-covered dome
- Ron Mueck's monumental crouching sculpture Boy
- Danish Golden Age painting shown alongside international contemporary art
