Two extraordinary exhibitions invite visitors to explore the vastness of space, both celestial and earthly. From NASA missions to Turner’s luminous skies, they celebrate humanity’s enduring fascination with awe, imagination and the infinite..
From the boundless frontier of outer space to the sweeping skies of the Romantic landscape, two exceptional exhibitions opening in Bath explore the awe, wonder and spiritual grandeur of vast spaces, both real and imagined.
Beyond Infinity: American Space Exploration, opening this July at the American Museum & Gardens, invites visitors of all ages to dream bigger than ever before. This immersive family exhibition celebrates the marvels of American space exploration, a journey powered not only by rocket fuel and science, but by an enduring human drive to reach beyond the visible and touch the sublime. Featuring interactive zones filled with rocket models, astronaut games, moon missions and NASA history, the exhibition captures how space exploration is both a technological achievement and a deeply imaginative pursuit.
That same sense of awe around looking up and being transformed pulses through Impressions in Watercolour: Turner and his Contemporaries, curated by Ian Warrell and already on view at the Holburne Museum. This rare gathering of works by J.M.W. Turner and his circle celebrates how 18th- and 19th-century British artists turned their gaze to the natural world, expressing its immensity and mystery through light, atmosphere and expressive colour. Turner’s sweeping watercolours, often sketched directly under vast skies across Europe, convey the emotional intensity of landscape as something cosmic – an Earth-bound parallel to the galaxies above.
The imaginative leaps made by NASA engineers and astronauts find their artistic echo in the experimental brushwork and bold palettes of Turner, Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman. Just as Turner captured the ephemeral dance of clouds or the sudden brilliance of sunlight breaking over sea and mountains, NASA’s probes and telescopes reveal celestial storms on distant planets and glowing nebulae light-years away. Both worlds, the physical and the painted, are united by their scale and mystery, calling us to look up, wonder and feel small in the best possible way.
Visitors to Beyond Infinity will step into the story of the Apollo programme, touch lunar rock and take a virtual tour of the International Space Station, all experiences that echo Turner’s own explorations, albeit through pigment and paper. In both, the act of ‘exploration’ is a profoundly imaginative and emotional one – a reach into the unknown that is as spiritual as it is scientific. Where Turner evokes the sublime power of storms and silence, Beyond Infinity shows how space itself has become a new theatre for those timeless themes.
From Turner’s tempestuous skies to NASA’s stormy Jovian moons, these two exhibitions trace a path between the eye and the infinite – one via brush and paper, the other through stars and spacecraft. They remind us that across centuries and disciplines, the desire to capture the majesty of big skies and the thrill of boundless space has remained a constant in human creativity.
Beyond Infinity: American Space Exploration, 5 July –4 January 2026, American Museum & Gardens, Bath
Impressions in Watercolour: Turner and his Contemporaries, 23 May–14 September, The Holburne Museum, Bath