7 Artists Using Light as Their Medium
From colorful landscapes to illuminated messages, these women explore where imagination, technology, and artistic expression meet.
Light has always played an important role in art. Painters have spent centuries studying how it falls across a face or creates the illusion of depth. Photographers rely on it to capture their subjects, while architects use it to shape a building’s atmosphere.
But what happens when light becomes the artwork itself? The artists featured here all approach their craft in very different ways. What connects them is an interest in what light makes possible.
1. Grimanesa Amorós
From public spaces to historic architectural landmarks, Peruvian artist Grimanesa Amorós creates large-scale light sculptures that transform their surroundings.
Her fascination with light began after an encounter with the northern lights during a trip to Iceland. Captivated by the changing colors, she began exploring how she could create similarly immersive experiences.
In PASSAGE (2025), created for The Peninsula Istanbul in Turkey, Amorós transformed the hotel’s historic clock tower with a large installation of glowing red LED lights.
The building once served as a passenger hall for travelers crossing the Bosphorus, a waterway that has connected Europe and Asia for centuries. Drawing inspiration from the site’s history of travel, migration, and cultural exchange, Amorós used red light, a color closely associated with Turkey’s cultural identity, to evoke movement, memory, and the passage of time.
She makes architecture part of the artwork, using light to connect a place’s past with its present.
View the original article by Claire Potak.